Keywords: World Day Of Peace
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INTERNATIONAL
- Geraldine Doogue
- 18 June 2024
I wonder how many Australians were captivated, as was I, by the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations? They seemed epochal to me: a reminder of something remarkable and a pointer to something possible, namely new resolve to maintain peace in Europe. Not too many Australians, as it turned out, were similarly mesmerised.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Peter Steele
- 16 June 2024
'From window and doorface painted in carnival, and / your foxing spirit here for a term / becoming again and again the flambeau it carries, / dear dirty Dublin a thing of fire.' A poem recollecting visits to the Jesuit-run Belvedere College, in the north of Dublin, where James Joyce completed most of his secondary schooling. (From 2007)
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 07 June 2024
Raimond Gaita insists that there is something precious in each human being. He does not rest this conviction on a particular religious or philosophical grounding. It flows, rather, from a rich reading of human possibilities and questioning of the meaning of life.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Andrew Hamilton
- 05 June 2024
Days like World Environment Day aim to combat apathy, urging action against the grim realities of climate change. Despite dire headlines, there are grounds for hope, if not for optimism. Any change in environment for the better must be grounded in a change of heart.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 23 May 2024
When Pope Francis delivered a message for the World Day of Social Communications, he focused on AI. The pope posed a wide range of questions including how to regulate its development and use in order to avoid the manipulation of truth and the inevitable centralisation of wealth and power.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 27 March 2024
1 Comment
Palm Sunday stands at the intersection of the world of justice and goodness and the brutal political realities in human societies. It mocks the pretensions of power that considers only the expediency of actions and not the human reality of the people affected by them. At that intersection today, refugees lie in the centre.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 10 November 2021
13 Comments
Aficionados of United Nations Days and Weeks will know that this is the Week of Science and Peace. In the middle of it, perhaps deliberately and certainly paradoxically, sits Remembrance Day. Initially called Armistice Day, it marked the end of the First World War and of the industrial scale killing involved in it. The events of 1918 and what they might say about the relationship between war and science merit reflection today.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 27 May 2021
27 Comments
A wry satisfaction to be enjoyed in reading histories of events of your youth is that it uncovers your prejudices at that time. It reassures you that you have grown wiser but also makes you wonder whether your present attitudes will need revisiting. Save Our Sons, Carolyn Collins’ detailed and even-handed study of women’s campaign against conscription during the Vietnam War, offered such pleasures.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Brian Matthews
- 01 November 2019
3 Comments
The scene I have described was more than purely peaceful. In these iron days, to write about or seriously discuss the world of nature and its phases and complexions can be a political act, 74 years after Orwell wondered about that very same point in 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.
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AUSTRALIA
- Francine Crimmins
- 28 April 2017
2 Comments
The air-conditioned bus offers a sanctuary from the tropical temperatures outside. It's hard to believe these are the same temperatures experienced by inmates over 70 years ago on this site. It is not often that we consider peace as something we must constantly work for. Often it is portrayed as something which can be achieved and then passed down to us. Changi reminds us we shouldn't become complacent in our memory of war because it might cause us to lose sight of how we keep peace today.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 24 September 2015
3 Comments
This year's International Day of Peace comes amid much war-making. Those with a feel for history may see it as an echo of an idealistic age that had experienced years of war and was determined to shape a better world. To those caught in fear and violence, and promised another ten years of the same, it will come as an insinuating hope against hope; a reproach to a world that stirs rather than douses wars.
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- Frank Brennan
- 24 June 2015
1 Comment
Given the ready access we have to international media and the world wide web, we can no longer plead ignorance of the trouble going on in our world. Those of us who are purist pacifists can presumably put a coherent case for eschewing violence in all cases, even were a madman to be imminently threatening the lives of our most vulnerable loved ones.
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