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Keywords: Complexity

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • AUSTRALIA

    Pragmatism: obscuring ideology in Australian politics

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 09 February 2021
    30 Comments

    The celebration of pragmatism in Australian politics obscures the role that ideology has always already played. In fact, one of the more stealthily ideological moves in Australian politics, generally made within that swirl of commitments people call ‘centrism’, is the de-politicisation of policy — the attempt to present policy as responsive to natural imperatives rather than to specific values and ideals.

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  • RELIGION

    Making space for conversation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 February 2021
    68 Comments

    The exchanges within churches echo trends in national life that heighten disagreements, lessen respect, and tend to confine conversation circles to people of similar views. People become annoyed if those opposing their views gatecrash their forums. This trend creates problems for Church sponsored publications.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Jesuit Refugee Service: '40 years of accompaniment'

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 November 2020
    7 Comments

    Stories of volunteers who went to help in foreign crises used to focus on the impact on the people helped. Today they explore how both parties are changed through the experience. That was also true in Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) whose 40th anniversary occurred last week.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    If life were a walk in the park

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 November 2020
    17 Comments

    These last weeks the possible re-election of Donald Trump has been one of the dark birds that visit many of us in the night. As with other such epochal events, of course, how we might react internally to it is of vastly less weight than its effect on the world. Neither early morning wandering nor anything else we can do will change that. But it might shape our response.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Imagining the Budget

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 October 2020
    8 Comments

    The Federal Budget this year coincided with the release of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Both are preoccupied with the shape that society will take after COVID-19. It is tempting to compare their different approaches.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Accounting for accountability

    • John Warhurst
    • 13 August 2020
    6 Comments

    Many in the community are crying out for accountability. The idea is appealing because it sounds like a simple framework, but in practice it is extremely difficult to apply.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Respecting dignity during public housing lockdown

    • Joshua Lourensz
    • 07 July 2020
    7 Comments

    Many of us, of course including residents of the towers, understand the exceptional response that COVID-19 has required, and that these lock downs form a part of the response. But when the situation has meant that people must, unless there are exceptional personal or medical grounds, remain house-bound for at least five days, we must be careful in the way we go about caring for the health of people.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Felling statues raises deeper questions

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 June 2020
    14 Comments

    The larger questions posed by the destruction of the statues, and indeed of reputations, that they symbolise, concern how to handle complexity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The girls are exaggerating

    • Jennifer Zeven
    • 22 May 2020
    13 Comments

    I spent the first six or seven years of my life spellbound by my mum’s stories of her childhood in Far North Queensland. Herstory came from warm, outback and subtropical places. She and her sisters wrote on slates at school, played in custard apple trees, kept their own bees.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learning in a time of pestilence

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 04 May 2020
    15 Comments

    What turned out to be extraordinary was the familiarity of the subject matter, and the routines that Camus makes the authorities of the plague-ridden Algerian town Oran put in place: the quarantine, the isolation hospitals, the attempts to develop a vaccine, the volunteer health workers, and the way in which funerals were conducted in haste.

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  • RELIGION

    Present from afar

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 April 2020
    13 Comments

    One of the challenges posed by social distancing is how to reconcile personal presence with distance. Presence is tactile and up close. Measuring out the prescribed separation as people walk around the park in the early morning tends to turn familiars into strangers and greetings into distancings.

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  • RELIGION

    Dawkins delusion: the legacy of New Atheism

    • Tim Robertson
    • 27 February 2020
    16 Comments

    Contrary to their claims, the New Atheists do have a creation myth. It goes something like this: emerging from darkness into the light, Enlightenment thinkers cast off the shackles of religion and, in so doing, ushered in an age of reason. For the likes of Richard Dawkins, a founding member of the movement, this is an article of faith, and he’s spent recent years casting himself not just as an heir of this tradition, but also as its modern day guardian.

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