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Keywords: Purgatory

  • AUSTRALIA

    The gates to the secret house of death

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 30 October 2024

      The traditions of All Saints Day and All Souls Day invite a rare reflection on death — a topic largely sidelined in contemporary Australia. Amid global events and various cultural spectacles, these days offer a quiet reminder to consider how we honour the dead and what that reveals about our values.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why we keep coming back to Groundhog Day

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 22 February 2024
    1 Comment

    Since its release, audiences, critics and philosophers have grappled with Groundhog Day’s take on time and eternity. Like all great art, Groundhog Day resists easy categorisation and is a story that, in a wonderful irony, we can go to again and again.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    From persecution to protection and the purgatory in between

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 28 October 2021
    6 Comments

    Mark Twain is reported to have said ‘history does not repeat, it rhymes.’ Watching a US helicopter evacuating people from the US Embassy in Kabul, that was rhyming. Many have seen this picture before, 30 April 1975, but then it was Saigon. The massive confusion, mixed messages, terrified people, lack of human rights protection happened in 1975, and still happens in 2021.

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  • RELIGION

    What religions really say about suicide

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 15 June 2018
    14 Comments

    Amid the shock and grief for Anthony Bourdain's death, one blue-tick Twitterer attempted to capture five minutes of shameful fame, declaring that religious people believe hell or purgatory is his afterworld destination. While all the great religious traditions generally proscribe suicide, they also contain nuanced views of the suicide's fate.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Life beyond IVF purgatory

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 31 May 2013

    It wasn't so much a phone call as a lifeline — the day the fertility clinic called me with news of my pregnancy. After six years of hoping, the life my husband and I had all but given up on was to be ours. At that same time, radio host Sheridan Voysey and his wife Merryn were facing a more heartbreaking outcome.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Across the purgatory sea to Botany Bay

    • Maria Takolander
    • 17 July 2012
    3 Comments

    Sophie, a Malagay slave in Mauritius, torched a barn housing a collection of leather straps — the flames soaring like the sounds of the black horses inside — and was packed off in a ship-sized crate to New South Wales.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Private school education in purgatory

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 09 March 2011
    3 Comments

    Parents and teachers have absconded. A violent altercation is documented by students with camera phones. During a drug-and-booze-addled party, a girl is assulted and left for dead. A pricey education is no substitute for an ethical framework.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Latin bruise and purgatory itch

    • Jennifer Harrison
    • 27 October 2009
    1 Comment

    on my way to the gospel gig, I watch .. the bible buskers Trucking for Jesus on Sackville Street ... Once, I heard a priest say, perhaps in a dream, .. It's useless to nail oneself to the wall.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Aged care in purgatory

    • Scott Stephens
    • 01 June 2009
    10 Comments

    Our failure to care for and honour our elderly is one of the great causes of moral impoverishment in our culture. Lives tempered by age and hard-earned virtue are gifts from God. It is to our detriment that we ignore them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Before L'Aquila's purgatory

    • Michael Mullins
    • 08 April 2009
    2 Comments

    Prior to the devastation of Monday's earthquake, L'Aquila was a picturesque hillside city of 75,000 inhabitants nestled in the Gran Sasso mountains. It was not always a plagued, razed purgatory.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How to escape the hell of suburbia

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 05 February 2009
    6 Comments

    Never mind purgatory: suburbia is hell, barbed with tedious career obligations, awash with too-bright light that leaves the skin looking transluscent, and populated with overly-cheerful, deluded demons. I was raised in the 'burbs, and still live there.

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