Keywords: Greece
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 18 January 2023
7 Comments
The ‘no religion’ question is complicated and interesting and connected with social change. We live in a much more complex world than previously. Even in my own childhood, it was accepted as a fact that most people were believers of varying degrees of conviction and form. Agnosticism and atheism were not matters for discussion.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 06 December 2022
8 Comments
The child, Wordsworth thought, is able to witness the divine in nature, but gradually this ability fades. Whereas once everything seemed apparelled in celestial light/ the glory and the freshness of a dream, four stanzas end with the questions Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? We know this development happens to us all.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 25 November 2022
In August 1660, the English Parliament passed the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, targeting those involved in the trial and execution of Charles I. The death warrant for Charles I had been signed by 59 judges, and 31 of them were still alive in 1660. Those caught suffered a terrible death of being hanged, drawn and quartered. Pursuit of the guilty was unremitting. Act of Oblivion follows the careers of three regicides and Civil War veterans who fled to the British colonies in America.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 08 November 2022
8 Comments
There are a great many despairing people about, with parents of children fearing they have no future; believing that by the time they are grown up the world as we know it will have ceased to exist. Floods, drought, wars, pandemics, climate change. In a world ever smaller and more connected, encouragement is needed.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 11 October 2022
Jonathan Freedland’s book is an extremely harrowing tour de force: at one stage I could read only a chapter at a time. But by the end I had been reminded of the power of the human spirit, and of the way in which some people, those with a sense of mission, can endure almost any trial. Resilience is a great gift.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 29 September 2022
5 Comments
Humans depend greatly on hope. In a recent interview, Tova Friedman discusses her book The Daughter of Auschwitz, the memoir of the part of her childhood spent in the eponymous and notorious concentration camp. Can someone who has seen first hand the depths of human depravity be at all hopeful about the future?
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INTERNATIONAL
- John D’Arcy May
- 28 September 2022
3 Comments
What can the pacifist do when confronted with naked tyranny? With Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, pacifists are faced with the dilemma of either helping Ukrainians defend themselves ― and what spirit and courage they have shown, led by their unlikely president ― or letting Putin have his way. If diplomacy stood a chance, it would be the alternative option for pacifists; but does it?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 02 September 2022
1 Comment
Australian cultural icon and erstwhile publisher Hilary McPhee calls Telltale ‘a rare thing, an ingenious memoir,’ and she is right. It is interesting and reassuring to note that books about reading and recollections of reading habits seem to be proliferating. Perhaps such writing is a defence measure against worrying developments like universities in England, for example, axing their English Literature courses.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 10 August 2022
6 Comments
It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes interested and supportive people to encourage athletic talent. A recent documentary on the world's most successful male distance runner Sir Mo Farah raises questions around how host countries know about waste of talent and opportunity when they routinely deport asylum seekers or lock them up?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 29 July 2022
2 Comments
Daniel Mendelsohn lectures in classics at Bard College, a liberal arts institution in New York State. His retired father, aged 81 in 2011, regrets gaps in his own education, and asks to sit in on his son’s course of seminars on Homer’s The Odyssey. Professor Mendelsohn agrees, and Jay Mendelsohn joins a class of 18-19 year-olds. Later, father and son go on a cruise that retraces The Odyssey where they discover: is home a physical place, or something you carry around with you or within you?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 29 June 2022
10 Comments
What causes racism? How does it start? Perhaps that’s at the heart of the matter: the difference, and the fear of it. Historically, we have tried to manage the fear via labels and categories: think of the ancient Greeks and their idea that anybody who did not speak Greek was a barbarian because of the bar-bar sounds that they made.
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RELIGION
- Bruce Duncan
- 21 June 2022
3 Comments
Some 278 Catholic bishops, clergy, religious personnel and lay people will meet as members of an unprecedented Plenary Council during 3-9 July to finalise the resolutions of their first assembly last year. However the May working document ‘Framework for Motions’, despite much worthy content, especially on Indigenous affairs, relies on a narrow notion of mission overly focused on inner-church issues at the expense of the wider social engagement that Francis emphasises.
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