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Keywords: Janus

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We’re outraged with hypocrisy. Is that hypocritical?

    • Barry Gittins
    • 29 January 2025

    As the news cycle fills with exposés of hypocrisy, from politicians to celebrities, we are confronted with uncomfortable questions: When should we hold others to account, and when should we accept the contradictions in ourselves and others? The answers, it seems, lie somewhere between judgment and grace. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How to be civil in an uncivil world

    • Barry Gittins
    • 13 October 2017
    3 Comments

    In 2017, we have had one of the most uncivil years in memory, with assaults against politicians, institutions, entire demographics. What can we learn from antiquity? The obvious lesson from Rome's post-Caesarian civil wars is that internecine conflict is inevitably punctuated by further conflict and wrestling for power.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Tweeting our way back to the Middle Ages

    • Brian Matthews
    • 03 November 2016
    4 Comments

    Curiously, while privacy continues to be valued and sought in the 21st century perhaps more strenuously than ever before, its milieu is once again the furious turmoil of aggressively public revelation, exhortation and threat that distinguished Johan Huizinga's scarifying portrait of the medieval world, in his book The Autumn of The Middle Ages. In our age, 'all things in life' once again have 'about them something glitteringly and cruelly public'. Or to put it another way, we have social media.

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  • RELIGION

    The problem with heroes

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 February 2016
    5 Comments

    Periods of anxiety are times for dreaming of heroes. We contemplate our own pedestrian lives and pedestrian politicians, and long for someone who can lead us out of the wilderness into the promised land. Yet although heroes invite us to dismount from our couches, breathe the open air and take on the world as they do, they also persuade us that they are a different breed, urging us to keep within our divinely given limitations and leave the business of change to those sown as lions' teeth.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Finding an antidote to populism

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 June 2015
    12 Comments

    In ancient Greece the relative merits of autocracy, oligarchy and democracy as a framework for wise governance were widely discussed. But the dreaded elephant in the room was always ochlocracy — mob rule. Populism has shades of the triumph of the mob over the wisdom that, say, a philosopher king might provide. The development of representative democracy can be seen as the simultaneous taming and incorporation of the mob into governance.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    I am not ephemeral

    • Marjon Mossammaparast
    • 24 February 2015
    8 Comments

    How many times rooted are we to earth, though we would reach away from it, lifting our arms like trees? My stem, yielding to the fashioner’s knowing hand? I am not after all ephemeral. No petals of a flower.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The business of unbirth

    • Peter Lach-Newinsky
    • 12 February 2008
    1 Comment

    candles and candle holders for funeral ceremony.. hand bouquet for the deceased.. coffin storage fee at cemetery cool room.. technical cremation fee

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Old days, lost ways

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 04 July 2006

    My grandmother lost four children. Born in the 1870s, she lived the perilous life of a respectable married woman of the working classes in the early part of the 20th century.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The king of children

    • Moira Rayner
    • 24 June 2006

    Moira Rayner on Janusz Korczak and the early history of children’s rights.

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