Keywords: Towards Healing
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AUSTRALIA
- John Falzon
- 23 March 2023
11 Comments
As jobseeker payments are indexed for inflation, increased payments are still well below the minimum wage and age pension. With successive neoliberal governments dismantling social infrastructure, people living in poverty have little means of escape. Poverty is not a personal choice but a political one.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 31 January 2023
17 Comments
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.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 20 December 2022
1 Comment
When we reflect on how best to live with the consequences of our shared, bloodied history, The Australian Wars calls for a counter-narrative; a re-positioning and re-phrasing of what has brought us to this point in our oft-stalled journey towards reconciliation.
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AUSTRALIA
- Glenn Loughrey
- 14 December 2022
1 Comment
In reflecting upon the Statement from the Heart, we need to explore what it is, what it is not, and how it works. The creative dynamic of the Statement is that it is a tool of justice and heart-healing. It is restorative justice writ large, involving the elements that make up the process leading to a resolution of the past and a creative response to the future by enacting justice in the present.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 02 September 2022
1 Comment
Australian cultural icon and erstwhile publisher Hilary McPhee calls Telltale ‘a rare thing, an ingenious memoir,’ and she is right. It is interesting and reassuring to note that books about reading and recollections of reading habits seem to be proliferating. Perhaps such writing is a defence measure against worrying developments like universities in England, for example, axing their English Literature courses.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 12 August 2022
Journalist and author Elle Hardy spent 15 months researching and writing her 2021 work Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. She notes the estimation that by 2050, one billion people around the world (one in 10 humans) will be a Pentecostal follower of Jesus (and their pastor).
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RELIGION
- Geraldine Doogue, Greg Craven, John Warhurst, Julian Butler
- 17 June 2022
3 Comments
After four years, the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia is nearly at a close with the second and final assembly in July. So what has been the significance of the Plenary Council so far, and what can we expect from the final session? In this Roundtable, Geraldine Doogue, John Warhurst, Greg Craven and Julian Butler reveal their hopes and expectations for the process and discuss likely outcomes.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 07 December 2021
4 Comments
Without Christmas, without that beautiful bookend of closure and celebration for another rather depressing year, where would we be? Speaking for me and mine, ensconced in the oft-locked-down leafy suburbs of Melbourne, 2021 promised much and delivered little more than a continuance of stress, bad blood among some of the tribes that comprise Victorian society, and the hope that heightened vaccination rates will translate into the need for no more lockdowns. That’s certainly a present worth unwrapping.
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FAITH DOING JUSTICE
The question of reconciliation in the Church is particularly pressing, given 2021 marks the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in Australia, and the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity to the Torres Strait. Yet many First Australians recognise that the Spirit of God was poured out onto the original inhabitants of this great Southern Land many, many thousands of years prior.
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AUSTRALIA
- Jenneke Foottit and Sue Gledhill
- 11 March 2021
2 Comments
The recently released report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care does not hold back in describing a situation that should be abhorrent to us all. As the report notes, ‘substandard care and abuse pervades the Australian aged care system’.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 10 December 2020
13 Comments
If we want to renew religious language and images we must begin with attention to the words we currently use, noticing their resonance as well as their meaning. It is then important for the language of prayer and reflection to be grounded in deep contemporary experience.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 04 June 2020
19 Comments
With churches closed throughout much of the world, many events and dedicated weeks have passed us by. One of those weeks was the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Catholics who paid attention to Pope Francis’ engagements may have noticed it through his references to the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul’s Encyclical on Christian Unity, Ut Unum Sint.
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