Religion
You know you are getting old when one of your students, genuine in her puzzlement, says to you, ‘Who was Bob Santamaria?’ Santamaria? The most famous lay Catholic since Ned Kelly! The man whose machine split Australian Catholicism for a generation; whose politics kept Labor from office for two decades; whose disciples and friends still move through the corridors of power in church and state! To meet someone to whom Santamaria is an unfamiliar name is to know that you too will soon be history.
... (read more)Morris West: A writer and a spirituality by Maryanne Confoy
I was supercilious towards Italy and Italians before seeing Italian films and reading Curzio Malaparte’s novels. Malaparte foiled the superciliousness while the films’ backgrounds, something as simple as sunlight in the squares, intrigued. Previously France had provided an alternative to Anglo-Saxon culture. An Irish heritage set me askew to Anglo-Saxondom, but it did not give me another language as English had supplanted Gaelic. In any case, Ireland was the past and a somewhat mythic past at that. My parents were attached to Ireland but even their parents had been born in Australia. Indeed there had been no direct contact with Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century; it was the past you could not reach but only romanticise. Being of Irish origin meant being Catholic outside the Anglo-Protestant Pale.
... (read more)David Ireland has been writing for us nigh on twenty years now and this, his ninth novel, more than slightly autobiographical one suspects, allows a perspective on his corpus in all the ambiguity of the term.
... (read more)Mr Santamaria and the Bishops: Studies in the Christian movement by Gerard Henderson
Rock Choppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia by Edmund Campion
Test-Tube Babies edited by William Walters and Peter Singer
Faces of My Neighbour: Three journeys into East Asia by Maslyn Williams
