On Friday, June 8, Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef turned convivial diner to the world, was found dead in Kaysersberg, a small village in the Alsace region of France. He died by suicide at age 61. His death partially eclipsed the apparent suicide of Kate Spade, the fashion designer, especially famous for her accessories. The Read more
Amid the targeted ads in my social media feeds, a war is playing out: two apps aggressively vie for my attention, stalking me from the sidebars of my browser and comprising every third photo in my Instagram feed. One offers to track my ovulation and get me pregnant. The other offers to do the same, Read more
As wake-up calls go, you couldn’t really ask for anything louder than this. Two facts about contemporary Australia seem to me to be so significant, they constitute the clearest possible warning about the direction our society is taking. Fact #1 We are experiencing a mental health crisis and, in particular an epidemic of anxiety, with Read more
For some of us, Head and Heart disagree so often we wonder how they can inhabit the same body. Here’s how their stories could be told. Heart is a happy Hippy, a flower child in love with love. Head is a serious disciplinarian whose love is law and order. Heart wants to live in a Read more
All my adult life, I have lived like a man. Enough. As a girl back in the 1970s, strong women surrounded me. My mother, my grandmothers, my four aunts, my great-grandmother and my countless great-aunts were all uninfected by the feminist belief that they were failures unless they replicated their husbands’ paid work. These were Read more
The Catholic Church cannot pretend to be shocked about the pattern of sexual abuse of adult seminarians by Cardinal McCarrick, recently detailed in a comprehensive story in The New York Times. As The Times made clear in its reporting, many church leaders had received multiple notices of the cardinal’s behavior. Local dioceses had been told, Read more
Challenging world oil executives to recognise the urgent environmental need to quickly transition from fossil fuel extraction and burning, to clean energy production, Pope Francis called them to take to heart that “Civilization requires energy, but energy must not destroy civilization.” Gathering the heads of some of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations – Read more
Archbishop Philip Wilson has gone from church leader with a reputation for dealing professionally with sex abuse cases to being stoned by all and sundry in the national village square. The calls to resign come not only from victims, anti-church crusaders and commentators of every ilk, but also eminent Catholics who fear he may cause Read more
In a line for his vision for renewal and change, Pope Francis captured something that is true for the church across the world but most especially for the church in Australia. The pope described our time in the church and wider society as “not so much an era of change as a change of era.” Read more
The world is full of lonely souls who need a beacon in their darkness, an ointment for their wounds, and a means of grace for their bereft spirits. For many, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae has been all that and more. When I read it for the first time, while I was still a Read more