For more than 50 years, CBM (formerly Christian Blind Mission) has helped restore sight to millions of people throughout the world. In our front cover image, 11-year-old Sintila returns home with his mother, Sunapatis, following successful cataract surgery. They walked for more than six hours to reach a CBM partner clinic in Kenya. Click here for ...
Crosslight Designer Garth Jones recently returned to his home town of Broken Hill for the Broken Heel Festival, now in its second year of celebrating Australian cult film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
In the following piece, Garth reflects on the galvanising evolution in acceptance and tolerance in regional Australia, and wonders what lessons our political leadership could learn ...
In the 65 years from 1788 in Australia, 25,655 women were transported from Britain and Ireland as convicts.
Most of these women have been known simply by their assigned convict number rather than as people. Rarely has the positive impact they made to the fledgling colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land been acknowledged.
BOOK | WHEN MICHAEL MET MINA | RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH
What happens when a teenager from an anti-immigration family meets a young Afghan refugee? That is the premise of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s latest young adult novel, When Michael Met Mina.
Michael is a high school student who wants to study design when he graduates. His parents are ...
I have written and spoken before about my partner Michael’s depression and anxiety and his death. With Mental Health Week approaching, I offer a brief reflection on some of the beliefs and attitudes I have experienced that make having a mental illness or caring for a family member with a mental illness more difficult.
As she prepares to leave office, Bethlehem’s first female mayor has made an impassioned plea for peace and justice for the besieged city and the wider region.
Vera Baboun, who is a Christian, claimed the mayorship of Bethlehem in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Ms Baboun led the Fatah party’s bloc of candidates to a ...
The Holy Land is a place of spiritual significance for the world’s three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
It is also one of the most volatile locations in the world. In this image, two Palestinian children are returning home from a school in Masafer Yatta, through a restricted area known as Firing Zone 918.
BOOK | AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE TIME OF TRUMP | DON WATSON
AS the United States prepares to head to one of the most divisive Presidential polls in history, author and speechwriter Don Watson returns with his second Quarterly Essay.
Watson, a former speechwriter for Paul Keating, adopts a travelogue structure, similar to his 2008 ...
VIDEO GAME | DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION
I did not expect to find myself reflecting on the nature of religion while playing a horned giant ‘Qunari’ using magic spells to fend off attacks from a demon horde. But then Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game full of surprises.
Let’s take a step back for a moment.
...
The sound of someone getting their sight back is often no sound at all.
That’s one of the things Uniting Church minister Rev Dona Spencer learnt when she observed eye cataract surgery patients in Kenya discovering if their operations had been successful.
“We were there in the hospital as they took off their bandages,” Ms Spencer said.
BOOK | ON AUGUSTINE | ROWAN WILLIAMS
Born in 354 AD, Saint Augustine was a modern thinker, relentless in his inquiring, and insightful on the formation of the self, traits that endear him to the secular as well as religious reader. But – just as playing a Beethoven symphony on a ukulele may result in the ...
BOOK | DEAR FAMILY: LETTERS FROM ARNHEM LAND 1962-1966 | BETH GRAHAM
How fortunate that these letters, written 50 years ago while Beth Graham and her husband Leigh were Methodist missionaries at Yirrkala and Croker Island in the Northern Territory, have survived. Their publication is a significant contribution to understanding an important era in Australian ...
