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Keywords: Hospitality

  • AUSTRALIA

    The pace of Muslim integration into Australian society

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 July 2015
    18 Comments

    Against the background of Australia's migration history, we can see the importance of Muslim groups maintaining their own praying community and culture including the use of their native language of worship. This will inevitably change with successive generations, but the pace of this is a matter for the communities themselves. The most harmful thing native born Australians can do is to pressure migrants to abandon their cultural roots in order to fit our expectations and to placate our fears.

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  • Frank Brennan's 'fifth gospel'

    • William Morris
    • 15 June 2015
    7 Comments

    'Frank points out that the Church cannot credibly proclaim a message of social justice in a pluralist democracy when its own processes fall short of ordinary community standards of justice. It needs to turn its teaching about human rights and human dignity back on itself, the Church, insisting on due process within the life of the Church community.' Bishop William Morris helps launch Frank Brennan's new book Amplifying That Still, Small Voice.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Excising the Rule of Law

    • Justin Glyn
    • 21 April 2015
    15 Comments

    When the term 'Rule of Law' was coined in the 19th century, it included a reasonable conduct stipulation to ensure fairness. A bill currently working its way through Federal Parliament would give those working in detention centres a low threshold in the use of force against detainees. The criterion of reasonableness of the officer’s conduct would be replaced by what an officer believes is reasonable.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The view from outside glass house Australia

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 January 2015
    24 Comments

    Complaints about hypocrisy are rarely edifying. But it’s not so easy to dismiss the charge of a Jakarta Post opinion writer that Canberra is trying to save Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan from the firing squad ‘while slowly disposing of “abject bodies” it does not want through inhumane detention camps or returning them to foreign regimes that will probably finish the job for them’. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott ready to put G20 behind him

    • Tony Kevin
    • 18 November 2014
    4 Comments

    Abbott's best G20 moment was his closing media conference, where he gave an outlined the meeting's achievement of a 2.1 per cent global economic growth plan  over the next few years. But on two important matters – climate change and Ebola - the dynamic of the meeting got out of his control and produced outcomes clearly not to his liking. Abbott's counter-strategy – quite successful in retrospect – was to set media hounds running to the side-drama of Vladimir Putin. 

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  • RELIGION

    Delma's big wide sigh of pain

    • Steve Sinn
    • 09 July 2014
    9 Comments

    She was walking up and down the middle of Roslyn Street, wailing. I put my arms over her shoulders: 'It's all-right Delma, its okay.' She turned and looked at me: 'Don't tell me it's all-right. It's not all-right'. It was for all the wrongs, all the anguish, the suffering, the pain, the separation from her family, land, culture, her children. I couldn't leave her. I called an ambulance. As she was carted out, she looked up from the stretcher: 'You betrayed me.'

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  • RELIGION

    Why Bishop Morris was sacked

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 June 2014
    53 Comments

    'My one new insight from reading Bill's book is that he was sacked because he was too much a team player with his local church ... the Romans hoped to shatter the morale and direction of those who had planned the pastoral strategies of a country diocese stretched to the limits as a Eucharistic community soon to be deprived of priests in the Roman mould.' Frank Brennan launches Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three by Bishop William Morris.

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  • RELIGION

    Vatican perspective on Australia's refugee brutality

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 June 2014
    3 Comments

    Very few Vatican documents on world events are exciting. But some can be helpful when local response to these events is febrile and anxious. The Vatican guidelines on ministry to forcibly displaced persons provide a helpful mirror to reflect the public Australian response to asylum seekers. It offers a long view of Catholic reflection on refugees and a broad perspective on the human reality of having to seek protection.

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  • RELIGION

    Lessons from Christian camp's gay discrimination

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 01 May 2014
    29 Comments

    In April the Victorian Court of Appeal upheld an earlier ruling that a youth camp run by the Christian Brethren had discriminated illegally against same-sex attracted persons by refusing a booking from a community health service for an event for young gay and lesbian people. This is not an isolated case. It is sobering that churches often seem to need the courts to give them lessons, if not about sex, then about hospitality and fairness.

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  • RELIGION

    Radical Pope's gender flaws

    • Megan Graham
    • 13 March 2014
    47 Comments

    The broad support Francis receives from progressives, despite his unwillingness to even consider female ordination, demonstrates how marginalised women's issues really are in our society. He may have changed the game in terms of the Church's engagement with the poor, but this does not diminish the significance of his oppressive and outdated views on gender roles.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cold silent life of a football monk

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 12 February 2014
    5 Comments

    He worked as a shoemaker in a local shoe store, and all the girls in town were secretly in love with him. In a football-mad town, he played at centre half back on the local team and was in that position the year they were beaten in the championship final. After that game, he disappeared. Finally, the truth came out. He had gone into a Cistercian monastery in the foothills of the Knockmealdown mountains.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Passion has a place in border protection's age of reason

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 07 February 2014
    24 Comments

    In the Australian migration debate, 'passion' is construed as opposed to 'reason'. But the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has said that 'passion' in its classical (ancient or biblical) sense, is not opposed to reason (being attuned to the world), but rather to 'peace' or 'harmony'. Therefore 'passionate' language — alongside practical proposals — can unsettle uncritical pictures of the issue.

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