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Keywords: Despair

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

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia's asylum seeker holocaust

    • Lyn Bender
    • 18 March 2014
    37 Comments

    The BBC's John Humphrys admonished Julie Bishop over the Coalition Government's off-shore processing centres, which he said 'have been described as 'breeding grounds for rape, riots, malaria and mental illness, that bear the look of concentration camps'. Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust, died recently in London. Her story contains salient lessons for Australia's border protection regime.

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  • RELIGION

    Chords of community in a country church protest song

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 March 2014
    9 Comments

    The conflict began with falling church attendances and a decision by the Koroit parish priest to rationalise resources. Although Regina Lane describes in detail the battles to save St Brigid's, her book is far more than a protest song against the power of the Catholic Church. The larger stories embodied at St Brigid's, the immigrant groups who formed the first congregation and their relationship to the first Australians, have continuing importance.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    How to cope with climate change grief

    • Lyn Bender
    • 03 March 2014
    24 Comments

    I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and have spent years in therapy coming to terms with the murder of my relatives and the destruction my parents' world. I now find myself confronting a future potential holocaust of gigantic proportions. Al Gore has warned us of the danger of moving from denial to despair, while omitting hopeful or determined action. Our only hope is to face the reality.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Time to honour Aboriginal frontier warriors

    • Paul Newbury
    • 21 January 2014
    23 Comments

    New Zealand, our partner in the Anzac legend, has no problem commemorating the Maori Wars of 1845–1872. Yet the Australian War Memorial refuses to honour Aboriginal warriors who fought and died defending their lands and their people against white invader settlers in the Frontier Wars of 1788–1928. This is a moral issue, and has the effect of excluding a whole people from commemoration based on a trifle.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2013: Australia's disgusting politics

    • Moira Rayner
    • 07 January 2014
    9 Comments

    Gillard is the most prominent woman in our country. She has been repeatedly humiliated, disparaged and ridiculed for that very reason. We may criticise her decisions, but always aware of the context in which they were made, which is dangerously toxic. Her courage under pressure is astonishing, but we ought to despair at her party which is willing itself into annihilation by adding more poison.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Christmas story's whisper from the edges

    • John Falzon
    • 17 December 2013
    13 Comments

    Recently Pope Francis blasted the so-called trickle-down economic theories in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. Some will scorn his message as naive at best and dangerous at worst, while others will regard it as an urgent enkindling of hope in the face of degradation and despair. The Christmas story hints that another kind of world is possible.

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  • RELIGION

    Pope Francis and Australia’s social justice agenda

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 October 2013

    'Here is a pope who is not just about creating wiggle room or watering down the teachings of the Church. No, he wants to admit honestly to the world that we hold in tension definitive teachings and pastoral yearnings — held together coherently only by mercy and forgiveness.' Frank Brennan's Wallis Lecture presented in Hobart on 24 October 2013 and Launceston on 25 October 2013.

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  • RELIGION

    Ways of knowing people in poverty

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 October 2013
    2 Comments

    The proper starting point for reflecting on poverty must be the lives of people who are poor. Like other human beings, people who live in poverty are defined by their relationships with family, friends, to home, to food and shelter, neighbourhood, to school, to work, to play and to society. Their poverty limits their opportunity to build these relationships.

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