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Keywords: Feast

  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget 2019 boosts inequality

    • John Falzon
    • 03 April 2019
    13 Comments

    The much trumpeted projected budget surplus is built on the backs of people who are left out and often made to feel that they are left over, surplus to the economy: people on low pay or no pay, young people, sole parents, people experiencing homelessness, people living with a disability.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Through the window a Eucharist of moon

    • Rory Harris
    • 18 February 2019
    2 Comments

    On the flight out of Manila / clouds sculpt prancing herds / & then the long drive south / to a home as we know it / back to a sound of almost rain.

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  • RELIGION

    On love, money and Valentine's Day

    • Barry Gittins
    • 13 February 2019
    6 Comments

    Valentine's Day is built on some fairly shaky historical ground. Rather than honouring a prelate offering bridal trysts, or hoping for a good harvest, I'm inclined to spare a thought for the Greek philosophers and poets who set up shop well before Romulus and Remus; I like to muse over their various efforts to pin down love.

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  • RELIGION

    Epiphany defeats hobgoblin evil

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 16 January 2019
    8 Comments

    One reason for the importance of Epiphany in Eastern Orthodoxy is the belief that Christmas is a period during which the world is threatened by various wicked spirits, most particularly the kallikantzaroi, the spirits of the dead: at this time they emerge from Hades (via a cave not too far from where I live) and roam the Earth.

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  • RELIGION

    Don't knock secular Christmas

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 December 2018
    17 Comments

    The point of the involvement of God in the minute details of human life is to assert the value of the human world in all its relationships. This means that the customs and practices of our Australian Christmas should not be dismissed as a corrupted and so inferior version of the Christian celebration. They should be appreciated in their own right.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Christmas through the ages

    • Jenny Blackford
    • 19 December 2018
    5 Comments

    At twelve, halfway through too many stifling hours crammed in the Holden station wagon, three girls munch Mum's ham sandwiches in a Rotary park ... At thirty, waifs-and-strays Christmases with friends in our adopted southern city.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In defense of Halloween

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 31 October 2018
    12 Comments

    As a kind of culture-blending holiday, there's room for many types of Halloween. The fact it has endured for so long and in so many forms is testament to how much we desire connection: to our past, to the dead, to one another. I don't think that's such a bad thing to celebrate.

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  • RELIGION

    A planet to heal

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 August 2018

    How are we to honour the commitment to peace of these Japanese and Maralinga survivors of nuclear conflagrations unleashed maliciously or negligently last century? We need to renew our commitment to painstaking negotiation of international treaties and agreements designed to ensure peace and security for all, insisting on the dignity and human rights of all.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Family diversity brings new reasons to feast

    • Amy Thunig
    • 08 June 2018
    4 Comments

    While we now lived in a less ethnically diverse region, our working-class, Indigenous Australian family grew more diverse. I was 12 when my sister Jay began to express an interest in Islam. That Christmas it was decided that to be more inclusive of her faith, the leg of ham would be taken off of the lunch menu. I raged against this decision.

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  • RELIGION

    Matching action to social justice rhetoric

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 February 2018
    9 Comments

    The World Day of Social Justice greets a year when social justice is returning to favour. Bank executives begin to own their social responsibilities. Liberal economics begin to be seen, not as the condition for a productive economy but as a barrier to it. That is the rhetoric. For governments, though, it is business as usual.

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  • RELIGION

    A familiar tribute to a marvellous priest

    • Frank Brennan
    • 15 January 2018
    2 Comments

    'Most of his life, Dr Johnson was a priest. Most of his life, he started his day sharing this bread of life with the world. He spent his childhood years here in Rocky, and he enjoyed his twilight years here. Rockhampton was home. Yet the cosmopolitan Grove was ever so much more at home in Rome, Paris or Sydney. And he meant that as no offence to the people of Rockhampton.' Homily delivered for the funeral of the 94 year old priest Grove Johnson.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Health gap widens as wage growth falls

    • Amy Coopes
    • 26 June 2017
    7 Comments

    Universal health care is an ostensibly bipartisan prerogative, but what it actually means and how it's achieved is a somewhat moveable feast. Spending, we are told, is unsustainable as the population ages and we move toward ever-more personalised and technologically-advanced treatment paradigms. The objective of this rhetoric is to rationalise the privatisation of our health system by stealth. The latest wages figures are something of an inconvenient truth in this 'unsustainable spending' fiction.

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