Keywords: Reading
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Paul Mitchell
- 10 May 2024
Les Murray once confessed it was his mission to 'irritate the hell out of the eloquent who would oppress my people,' by being a paradox that their categories can’t assimilate: the Subhuman Redneck who writes poems. And therein lies the ‘poem’ of Les Murray: complex, contradictory, sublime, and sometimes ready to whip his enemies with a scorpion’s tail.
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EDUCATION
- Erica Cervini
- 08 May 2024
Echoing their US counterparts, many Australian universities have also set up Gaza solidarity encampments with flags and signs like ‘From the River to The Sea Palestine Will Be Free’. Jewish students and staff have begun telling stories about feeling intimidated on campus.
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AUSTRALIA
- Gillian Bouras
- 02 May 2024
Where would we be without our friends? Good friends sustain us for decades through good times and bad and steer us through periods of change and crisis. One of the many downsides of old age is the loss of friends: they become ill and die. What to do then? How to cope?
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael McVeigh
- 22 April 2024
'Wokeness' is often centred around our need to understand others, particularly marginalised groups, and paradoxially, our inability to do so. The only way to overcome this problem is to find a way to transcend it – to centre our efforts on something greater. What if instead of ‘understanding’, we centre on ‘love’?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Nathan Scolaro
- 11 April 2024
2 Comments
Can a chatbot write a poem? The answer reveals something about the heart of human interaction. True connection, like true poetry, requires discomfort, vulnerability and a richness of experience that defies the simplicity of algorithms.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Peter Craven
- 05 April 2024
1 Comment
Nam Le is one of the strangest writers in the history of Australian literature and is also one of the most incandescently brilliant — which is very weird if you bear in mind that his primary claim to legendary status is a book of short fiction published in 2008. With 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Le returns with a new work that encapsulates the brilliance and complexity that fans and critics have come to expect.
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RELIGION
- John Honner
- 02 April 2024
12 Comments
Karl Rahner, a Jesuit priest whose ideas helped modernize the Church, left an indelible legacy on contemporary Catholicism. On the 40th anniversary of his death, what can a flower left at his niche tell us about the lasting bonds between belief, memory, and the enduring search for human connection?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Recent years have made clerical child sexual abuse a badge of shame within Australia’s Catholic hierarchy, and rightly so. But Anne Manne’s new book, Sins of the fathers, will give pause to those who blame these offences on the rule of hieratic celibacy.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 27 March 2024
Love is a much-used word, and, like domestic cutlery, it tends to lose its shine. Its boundaries then shrink to the average rather than to the inspiring. For that reason we need stories that stretch the ceiling of love beyond anything we could imagine. Not because we think that we could reach such far places, but because it enlarges the horizon of our lives.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 19 March 2024
Recognition is not simply an acceptance of facts. It involves also entering the experience of the people affected. Reconciliation must begin with truth telling, flow into empathy, and be followed by a conversation aimed at building decent relationships.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Juliette Hughes
- 15 March 2024
3 Comments
Two books about a 1942 massacre of Australian nurses were released last year. One is reliable, the other is notable for factual omissions. If we leave something out, are we then guilty of censorship? Alternatively, if our truth-telling offends someone else, what is our justification for so doing?
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 March 2024
In the face of developments where the commons are intruded upon for private profit and economic efficiency, we need to treasure such unfashionable concepts as the commonwealth, the common good and the houses of commons – the places for deliberation and decision where what is in the common interest is given priority over the benefit of the few.
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