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Keywords: Prayer

  • RELIGION

    Yarralumla Mosque, the day after Christchurch

    • Daniel Sleiman
    • 18 March 2019
    3 Comments

    A lady with tears in her eyes asked if I was Muslim. I told her that I am. She asked it if would it be okay if she came in and said a prayer. 'Of course,' I replied. She knelt, quietly sobbing, and said a few words. I also knelt and recited a few verses from the Quran. We were complete strangers sharing a unique and emotional moment.

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  • RELIGION

    Prayers of connection and disconnection

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 06 March 2019
    12 Comments

    I've recently been reading about people who disconnect in radical ways, or else manage a balancing act between connection with society and disconnection. The recently deceased Sister Wendy Beckett was one such. So too is Brother Harold Palmer who, like Sister Wendy, began his seclusion in a caravan.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The prayer-poems of Mary Oliver

    • Carol O'Connor
    • 31 January 2019
    10 Comments

    Mary Oliver, who died recently, came to realise it's not just kneeling and kissing the ground that needs to be encouraged, but that the natural world itself, which fed and sustained her creatively and emotionally for a lifetime, is now endangered. We are in danger of wrecking creation.

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  • RELIGION

    Sexual hypocrisy and the western church

    • Vicki Buchanan
    • 25 September 2018
    76 Comments

    Just as prayers and sacrifices did not measure the true holiness of the Pharisees, so too has sexual propriety provided a false measure of closeness to God in the West. If someone has multiple sex partners but is helpful to strangers, are they better or worse than someone who has only slept with their spouse but is racist or unkind?

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  • RELIGION

    Prayers for Peter Creigh and Philip Wilson

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 July 2018
    4 Comments

    I can personally attest that Philip Wilson has been one of the good shepherds in recent years when dealing with the plague of child sexual abuse. But as a young priest in Maitland-Newcastle back in the 1970s, it turns out that he heard things that make you feel sick in the stomach and tormented in the head all these years later.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ramadan: the fast and the flatulent

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 29 May 2017
    12 Comments

    You need not believe everything you read in the Herald Sun or an ISIS press release. Islam isn't just about armed jihad and violence against infant genitalia. Islam does have a spiritual side, and Ramadan is inherently spiritual, full of prayer and fasting and hardly any horizontal bedtime action. The theory behind all this deprivation is that if you're hungry and thirsty and sex-deprived between sunrise and sunset for an entire month, you'll gain a spiritual high that should last you the rest of the year.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Prayer at the scarred tree

    • Martin Flanagan and David Adès
    • 20 March 2017
    6 Comments

    This hunger that gnaws endlessly in my guts will be the death of me, but is the life of me, because in braving yourself to the emptiness something is born, something happens. Watch and observe, tell the story well, make it an expression of your sanity, which is otherwise at risk from waves generated by the outside world and past regrets.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scorsese misses the depths of the 'Japanese swamp'

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 22 February 2017
    7 Comments

    We are treated at length to Rodrigues' reflections upon the face of Christ, yet the beautiful inculturated image 'Madonna of the Snows' passes us quickly by. There are haunting local hymns yet the missionaries speak halting Japanese. The local church is served by a respected un-ordained head, who leads his fellow villagers in prayer and good works. The survival of the Japanese Catholic community rested on the feeble, faith-filled shoulders of the local women and men who kept praying even unto death.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Poem for Daniel Joseph Harrington

    • Brian Doyle
    • 24 October 2016
    5 Comments

    This is what I saw at a funeral, on a bright brilliant crystal spring day which the late lamented would most surely have called a great day for golf: His grandson, age smallish, dandling the deceased's favourite club on the lawn outside the church, as all the mourners stood around chatting. The boy whirled it like a baton, and balanced it on a finger, and finally leaned insouciantly on the club, exactly as his grandfather had so very many times before. It seemed very much to be a prayer, somehow.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No sex please, we're praying

    • Rodney Wetherell
    • 07 June 2016
    2 Comments

    In prayer, our minds are sex-free, let us hope; our thoughts of God do not include the body, his or ours, svelte or chunky, erotic perfume should be undetectable, ditto the sense of orgiastic writhing sent down to us from digital porn heaven. Should your inner eye pick out an angel, beautiful, and fixing eyes on you, or Jesus wearing little but a wisp of cloth across a gym-toned body streaked with blood, contact your counsellor, ring that number - you've wandered to the opposition site.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Francis' day to pray underlines priority for environment

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 31 August 2015
    5 Comments

    Pope Francis has named 1 September as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. There are many such days, and it will pass unnoticed in many local churches. But his naming of it - and its reception - will reveal much about the style with which he chooses to address environmental degradation, throwing his weight behind the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who had previously consecrated the day to the Environment.

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  • 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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