While much needed attention is being given to refugees flowing from war-torn Syria, one desperately suffering Middle East nation is barely a blip on the developed world’s radar screen. And to be honest, Yemen wasn’t on my radar screen either, until I met Barbara Deller. For 12 years Deller worked as a hospital nurse-midwife in Read more
In 15 years of practicing medicine, I have had one conversation about euthanasia and a handful about medical marijuana. Alternative therapy comes up most days but the vast majority of my conversations as an oncologist are about prolonging life. They are about doing the utmost to extract the last drops from a finite life, if Read more
In the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century (so far), Indonesia has been blotted out by smoke. And the media. I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Read more
I am a teacher in a high school in Porirua. Along with other qualifications I hold a BSc majoring in both Zoology and Psychology. My father passed away in 2004 due to stomach cancer and my grandmother was in long term care for three years as the result of becoming disabled after several strokes. As Read more
I was visiting Canberra’s splendid Arboretum the other day and I ran into an historian who is not one of us. He greeted me: “That new pope of yours is doing quite well, isn’t he? I don’t know that he will show us the road to paradise but he has definitely opened a few doors Read more
I was talking recently about the Synod with a very experienced parish priest. He said that if the bishops thought we were all waiting with bated breath for their decision regarding the divorced remarried receiving Communion, then they really do live in cloud cuckoo-land. Nowadays divorced Catholics don’t just hang around waiting for a bevy Read more
If we believe that everything on this earth is a teacher, then we’ll probably acknowledge that some of the most beautiful lessons come from children who are still close to heaven. We, who have grown away from that clear-sighted state, are sometimes surprised back to it, by a simple comment from a child. My son Read more
This year’s discussion at the Synod on Family tended to be reduced in Western media to two issues: communion for divorced-and-civilly remarried, and Church teaching and pastoral care regarding homosexuality. Actual topics brought up during meetings were much broader. As well as the ‘Western’ topics, Synod fathers also developed themes such as domestic violence, violence against Read more
In the space of just a week, twin failures by Binyamin Netanyahu coalesced into a new menace: the one, a near monstrous failure – the matter of the mufti and Hitler; the other, a small and nearly comic stumble, surveying the Gaza border region through binoculars that still had their lens caps on. At once Read more
Nobody, of course, because there weren’t two “sides” or camps or (heaven help us) factions or anything so nasty as all that. It was all a dialogue, a moment of encounter and discernment, an opening to the Holy Spirit that set the Roman Catholic Church free to be church in a new way for the Read more