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Keywords: Texts

  • RELIGION

    Rising from the ruins of 2010 Mass translation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 February 2018
    46 Comments

    In Christian churches the celebration of liturgy is always contentious. Fr Gerald O'Collins' latest book deals with a relatively small and domestic issue: the ingeniously engineered launch and spluttering subsidence of a revised English Catholic Mass translation. Though small, the events carry a large symbolic weight.

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  • RELIGION

    New Year dreams of a better world

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 January 2018
    10 Comments

    The beginning of the year is traditionally a time to look beyond the messiness of the past year, to imagine a larger and more generous life, and to make good resolutions. It is also a time for reflecting on the character of public life and to ask whether we find there any large vision of a better world. And, indeed, to ask whether we should look for one.

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  • EDUCATION

    Bringing the classics back to schools

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 31 October 2017
    9 Comments

    American-British writer Amanda Foreman is campaigning to return authors such as Austen, Dickens and Eliot to curricula in famous schools. But teachers have told her that a generation reared on smartphones and iPads finds such authors too ‘difficult'. So what? is my inward cry.

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  • RELIGION

    Child protection, compliance and conversion

    • John Honner
    • 07 September 2017
    5 Comments

    In the Christian gospels the child is the exemplar, par excellence, of what God's world is meant to look like. In social policy, on the other hand, the child tends to be portrayed as a powerless innocent. In recent years, the Catholic Church has failed the standards of both gospel and society: on the one hand by discounting the importance of children and not listening to children, and on the other hand by not having appropriate practices and policies to ensure the safety of children.

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  • MEDIA

    Storming the pixels: New frontiers of race activism

    • Tseen Khoo
    • 05 September 2017
    5 Comments

    There's storming the barricades, and there's storming the pixels. Critical race activism in the 21st century can take on fascinating forms. A great recent example of this is the destruction of Confederate monuments in the United States, and the debates and actions surrounding these events. They generated larger conversations about culture wars and re-ignited the cycle of argument around historical authenticity, heroism and - dare anyone say it these days? - truth.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Solitaire and Some souls

    • Margaret Quigley and Edith Speers
    • 15 August 2017

    Were I to call Were I to stumble  Or even fall  Would you hear me?  Would the constant babble  Of texts and tweets and twitters  Silence my helpless cry

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bookending Australia's history

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 July 2017
    9 Comments

    Modern Australian history is bookended by the arrival of white settlers in which Indigenous Australians were expelled to the margins, and by the arrival of people seeking protection who were also expelled to the margins. Between these bookends lie the events, the people, the relationships, the enterprises and the experiences that compose the story of Australia. The bookends, though, are a bit shonky: not ideal for supporting proudly the heft of the history that lies between them. They need fixing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Is there an Asian Australian culture?

    • Tseen Khoo
    • 11 July 2017
    7 Comments

    The short answer is 'no'. There is no single Asian Australian culture, just as there is no single 'Australian culture'. As well as an unfortunate tendency to flatten differences, trying to talk about particular groups can serve a broader political and cultural project. I run a research network focused on Asian Australian Studies. The topics we cover strive to give depth and detail to otherwise stereotyped, shallow representations of Asians and Asian Australians that surround us.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    You beaut country

    • Tony London
    • 03 July 2017

    His baseline is country, ridges, lakes, breakaways, songlines, and we are taken along the skylines of his imagination which shoulders its way through the streamers of the players race, colours askew, bursting out into the field of play where we are invited into his game, his rules, goal posts he moves forever, we engage with the master gamer.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our addiction to connection is centuries old

    • Sarah Klenbort
    • 15 June 2017
    4 Comments

    On a recent tour of Vaucluse House in Sydney's east, I couldn't help but notice, in every bedroom, a writing desk. I imagined Sarah Wentworth scribbling away with inkpot and pen 180 years ago. I wonder if the Wentworths went straight to their writing desks first thing in the morning, the way some people check their phones? The desire to receive news from someone somewhere else is century's old. In 1850 Tasmania had 11 newspapers, for a population of 70,000.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Raising feminist men in 1970s America

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 07 June 2017

    Abbie introduces Jamie to the paired liberating movements of punk rock and second-wave feminism. Both lead to illuminating experiences, from his first rock concert, use of alcohol, and kiss, to being beaten for casting aspersions on a peer's grasp of female sexual anatomy. His relationship with Julie on the other hand provides a difficult counterpoint. His peevish concern over her promiscuity is largely possessive; his theoretical understanding of women's agency falling down in the face of adolescent hormones.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The counter-cultural, rehumanising work of volunteers

    • Fatima Measham
    • 27 April 2017
    4 Comments

    A significant portion of the work that goes on in our economy is voluntary. It features in many contexts, such as social welfare, mentoring, animal welfare, landcare, local sport, and arts and literary activities. It can be hard to make a case for volunteering at a time when labour exploitation is rife. Students, migrants and Indigenous people, who need to establish work experience, are particularly vulnerable when it comes to unpaid work. This does not mean that volunteer work can never be meaningful.

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