EOFY Reflections
My reflection for the June CatholicCare Sydney newsletter is available here.
My reflection for the June CatholicCare Sydney newsletter is available here.
Read my reflection for CatholicCare Sydney here. Or listen below.
In this reflection for CatholicCare Sydney I reflect on how traditional Catholic Lenten practices are good for us and for our world. Read the reflection here. How will you be observing Lent?
Each day my commute begins with a trip on the Manly ferry. It’s a great way to start the day – coffee, reflection, and a chance to contemplate one of the world’s great harbours. Tourists who travel for pleasure love only the blue sky, sunny, calm water days, but seasoned ferry commuters learn to love the more subtlle, less flashy moods of the harbor. The Emerald City can be wearer-of-the-black serious. The quiet introspection of drizzly grey days on the harbor have their place in the ryhthmn of our lives. So too the wild days and slightly perverse delight in picking… Read More »Christmas Island & Advent
I’m not the only one who gets annoyed at the way in which so many traditional celebrations are now crassly commercialised, or at the general coca colonialisation of Australian culture. Not that I am a traditionalist, wanting to freeze frame life “back in the day”. Cultures are dynamic, living things, and in fact I work for social transformation. I acknowledge that feeling miffed at the paganisation of Christian feasts is somewhat ironic – the way in which ‘Christmas’ is treated in popular culture could be seen as fair return for the Christian appropriation of the pagan spring festival at Easter. Yet… Read More »Remembering the dead – or why I hate Halloween
The Swiss Guard are armed and willing to use force if necessary, but, as far as I know, they have never used cluster munitions. So why was the Holy See so eager to be one of the first states parties to ratify the Convention to Ban Cluster Munitions which will enter into force on 1 August 2010? Catholic Social Teaching holds the use of lethal force to be always regrettable but, in certain limited circumstances, to be acceptable. Even when the strict conditions for a just war (jus ad bellum) are met – and they rarely are – there are… Read More »Vatican Beats the Drum on Cluster Munitions