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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
Last year, the late Cardinal George Pell anonymously published a memorandum that criticized Pope Francis and his vision of a synodal church and condemned the Synod as a ‘catastrophe’, Cardinal Pell's memo signals building tensions between different visions for the future of the Church in Australia.
Amidst concern for the painful experience of First Nations peoples on Australia Day, and a desire for justice I find myself bouncing between question of moving the date, and all the strands of what the day means and represents.
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.
It is unfortunate that World Communications Day is celebrated in the middle of an election campaign. We have seen the worst of partisan media coverage, of shouting as a preferred form of communication, of endless experts promising Armageddon if the result is not to their taste. And yet we have also seen the best of media informing us of the issues that concern people in different parts of Australia. Without such public communication, for all its defects and excesses, our society would be the poorer.
Filep Karma was found dead on a beach on 1 November, 2022. He was a respected and long-time activist for Papuan freedom. He was jailed in July 1998 and then released after eighteen months. In December 2004 he was again arrested and charged, being sentenced to fifteen years in prison. His crimes? Repeatedly raising the Morning Star flag.
Sometimes it pays to sit still in a central business district, the aorta of any city, and nod in recognition to life as it passes you by. Bypassed from the stream, you watch and learn as the passers-by flow around you. Mystery and revelation. Connection and dissing. Peace and discord. Meaning, transcendence and futile, random pain. It’s all there if you look close enough. Pause long enough to witness the mysteries.
Gamification affects almost all our online activities, from communicating to shopping, with gaming elements omnipresent in the form of points, avatars, badges, leader boards, and real-life rewards. Stripping activities of their intrinsic value, virtually any online activity could be transformed into a challenge to win. Yet users make the mistake of focusing on the game rewards without seeing how the game itself is subtly changing behaviour.
How do we go from insisting our children tell the truth, even if it leads to punishment for breaking rules, to casually accepting a lack of veracity from societal ‘leaders’? Why in this age of social media when the mildest of heterodox comments cause a storm of protest do blatant untruths cause not even a ripple?
The world is facing cross-currents: a collapsing financial system that is balanced by the benefits of massive, long term improvements in production efficiencies, mainly because of technological advances. It is a bad news/good news story that can only be seen accurately if the intractable errors of contemporary economics are jettisoned. We are in a battle between finance fictions and reality.
Why is it that we so often don’t learn from the last war’s mistakes? Time and again, humans are drawn into patterns of behaviour that echo those of the past, and that lead once again to armed conflict. It's too easy to shy away from examining the moral failure that is war. When we eulogise the fallen, do we forget why they were butchered in the first place?
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.
Two weeks ago, Bishop Hilton Deakin died. My memories of him are inextricably tied to the Mass he celebrated in 1999 at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, certainly the most emotionally charged event that I have seen there, following the violence orchestrated by the Indonesian military following the Referendum on Independence in East Timor. During the struggle for Independence, many East Timorese had joined the Catholic Church.
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