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Keywords: Australia's First Saint

  • ENVIRONMENT

    The book corner: Humanity's Moment

    • Michele Gierck
    • 24 March 2023

    Climate science doesn't make for comfortable reading. As the climate crisis continues to escalate, Dr. Joëlle Gergis, prominent climate scientist and one of Australia's lead authors of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, offers readers a unique perspective on the urgent need for mass climate action and why we have reason to hope. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Dogging the man in the iron mask

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 November 2022
    3 Comments

    In Justice in Kelly Country, author Lachlan Strahan writes on the life of his great-great-grandfather, a policeman whose career stretched over thirty years. When a significant part of that story is intermeshed with such a fiercely contested story as Ned Kelly’s, telling it introduces the further complexities of the writer’s sympathies and judgments.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    The spirit of The Way

    • Michael McGirr
    • 09 September 2022
    5 Comments

    The Way had been a community of homeless people, built around difficult but wonderful characters. It taught me more than I can easily say. It was a world where things were not always as they seemed and people did not fit into little boxes. We had many challenging days and relationships with our guys were seldom easy, but there was an energy that found light in unexpected places.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Best of 2021: How do fathers figure in?

    • Mike Kelly
    • 04 January 2022
    2 Comments

    There are many gems and reflections on ‘fathering’ in Pope Francis’s apostolic letter, Patris Corde ‘With a Father’s Heart’, in which he nominates 2021 as the year to honour the fatherhood of St Joseph. Francis’s letter is inclusive, encompassing the scope of fatherhood and the responsibilities fathering entails. ‘Fathers are not born, but made’, Francis says.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    An incarnation of chiaroscuro

    • Ian C Smith
    • 13 April 2021
    3 Comments

    I flip his collar, air chill, damp, my quick fists burrowing into jacket pockets. I long for an angel with Edie’s face, convent-innocent, unlike mine, who might understand, even share, my boyish dream of making the big time.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    How do fathers figure in?

    • Mike Kelly
    • 01 April 2021
    5 Comments

    There are many gems and reflections on ‘fathering’ in Pope Francis’s apostolic letter, Patris Corde ‘With a Father’s Heart’, in which he nominates 2021 as the year to honour the fatherhood of St Joseph. Francis’s letter is inclusive, encompassing the scope of fatherhood and the responsibilities fathering entails. ‘Fathers are not born, but made’, Francis says.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    That first sanctuary

    • Ian Smith
    • 21 July 2020
    1 Comment

    He enters a university library at thirty-five feeling like an imposter, rougher-hewn from suffering than most students, wrapped in an aura he thinks religious pilgrims experience shuffling along echoing naves of Gothic cathedrals, sombre, joyous.

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  • RELIGION

    Aussie bishops can't shy from celibacy questions

    • Nick Brodie
    • 16 January 2020
    55 Comments

    Cardinal Sarah's scandal-causing book arguing against changes to the rule of mandatory celibacy was a transparent attempt to thwart proposals coming out of the Amazonian Synod of 2019. Whatever the fallout, it should not be allowed to scare Australia's bishops off from discussing the subject during Plenary Council 2020.

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  • RELIGION

    Supporting those on the margins

    • Frank Brennan
    • 18 February 2019

    'We can do this better by breaking down the silos and binding together our concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.' Opening Keynote Address by Fr Frank Brennan SJ at the Catholic Social Services Australia National Conference, Port Macquarie 19 February 2019.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mary MacKillop's advice for today's politicians

    • Michael Mullins
    • 06 May 2013
    13 Comments

    'Never see a need without doing something about it' is the principle that guided Australia's first saint Mary MacKillop. This is also what drives successful politicians, and the NDIS is a good but rare example of this. Unfortunately few political leaders are able to see a real need and successfully legislate to do something about it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Historical precedents for Jones' Shamegate

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 October 2012
    10 Comments

    The name Charles Hughes Cousens is not one that has been canvassed during the lamentable and often tawdry debate about the Alan Jones affair, but perhaps it should have been. Cousens' ordeal as the target of a treason-baying press lies in the distant but pointed background to Jones' assault on Julia Gillard.

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  • RELIGION

    What difference does it make now that Mary MacKillop is a saint?

    • Frank Brennan
    • 14 October 2011

    Mary visited Rome as a young religious woman when she was being persecuted by local bishops for being too independent. She got a good hearing from the Pope and great assistance from Fr Anderledy who became the Superior General of the Jesuits. If only Bishop Bill Morris could have received the same sympathetic hearing.

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