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Keywords: Human Dignity

  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Affirming human dignity for all

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 18 February 2021
    37 Comments

    We live in a time when around the world so many lives seem not to matter. Whether they be Uighur lives, women’s lives, Black lives, Yemeni lives or refugee lives. So widely disregarded in practice, the large claim that every life has value, however, oftentimes has to be justified. The ultimate reason is that each human being is precious and has an inalienable dignity. No person may be used as a means to another’s end.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Putting a value on a human life

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 October 2020
    7 Comments

    The response to COVID has invited reflection about the relative value of one human death (and so of one human life) as compared with another. This is a radical question because it makes us ask whether the value of a human life is defined by economic wellbeing and by potential contribution to the economy, or by deeper qualities.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mobile phone bill threatens dignity and decency

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 September 2020
    21 Comments

    The objections to the legislation focus correctly on the infringement of human rights. That phrase, however, is bloodless. It might suggest that rights form a list to be ticked off. Human rights are better conceived as a way of speaking about the conditions necessary for people to live decent human lives. The proper place from which to reflect on them is the actual lives of the people who are affected.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    JobSeeker and reflecting on government responsibilities

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 July 2020
    3 Comments

    Government must respect the human dignity of people who are often regarded as a burden on society. Seen from this perspective the JobSeeker allowance is deceptively named. It conflates two distinct though related responsibilities of government: to promote participation in the workforce by matching jobs available to people seeking them, and to provide for those who cannot work.

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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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  • RELIGION

    Thoughts on marriage after Yes

    • Joel Hodge
    • 16 November 2017
    58 Comments

    Arguments are made that to be recognised or not as a specific type of sexual being (with certain rights) is what fundamentally matters to who I am as a person. People on both sides have made this error. This is a dangerous position that subjects human dignity and identity to a false absolute.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Waiting for the trickle down effect

    • Frank Brennan
    • 10 April 2017
    16 Comments

    In an age of 'budget repair', social policy risks becoming just a sidebar to economic policy which is a contest of ideas about how best to grow the size of the pie thereby providing a slice for 'the deserving poor' without having to redistribute too much of the pie, while 'the undeserving poor' drop off the edge as they would have anyway. For those of us schooled in Catholic social teaching, the so-called 'undeserving poor' are the litmus test of our commitment to the human dignity of all persons.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dying with dignity in Madrid

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 August 2016
    6 Comments

    The film's quiet humour leaves open many spaces for reflection on getting older, and on mortality. Tomas is uncomfortable with the subject of death, but Julian is determined to confront it with honesty and dignity. His activities during those four short days reveal he possesses a well formed conception of his own humanity and mortality that is not short of admirable. We are as sympathetic to Paula raging against her cousin's resignation, as we are to Tomas' growing acceptance.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Legislating for human dignity without being misty-eyed

    • Kate Galloway
    • 02 May 2016
    23 Comments

    I have often wondered at the likely success of entreaties to compassion for asylum seekers. This is not because I do not personally feel compassion for these people. And it is not because I do not believe that it is morally correct to show compassion, including through government policy. Rather my response is partly a factor of my training as a lawyer. Through my legal eyes, I can see little hope for appeals to politicians to show compassion. My conditioned response instead is to appeal to law.

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  • The inviolable inherent dignity of Aylan Kurdi

    • Frank Brennan
    • 07 September 2015
    11 Comments

    I believe in Aylan's inviolable, inherent dignity as a human being like all of us, no matter what side of a national border we might live. I believe that a globe of 7.3 billion people with inviolable, inherent dignity confronts huge challenges and real evil when almost 60 million people are displaced. I believe that secure national borders for a country as geographically and jurisprudentially isolated as Australia confronts an enormous moral challenge, and that we are falling short, badly and selfishly.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why Pope Francis' new encyclical is so radical

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 June 2015
    10 Comments

    The interdependence of human beings on one another underlies the Catholic insistence that the dignity of all human beings must be respected, so that the test of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. Laudato Si extends that solidarity to the natural world.

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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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