The British singer-songwriter Steven Demetre Georgiou is better known by his stage name, Cat Stevens. He was all the rage in my adolescence, and perhaps the young Fr Rayner crooned some Cat Stevens with his CYO group. Then, in my last year at school and to everyone’s surprise …
When most people in a country like Australia hear the word ‘slavery’ they think of Africans brought across the sea to work the cotton plantations of America. But since the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833, in the French colonies in 1848, and in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, most people would think slavery a …
One of the most highly acclaimed films of the past year is the biographical war drama, Hacksaw Ridge. Andrew Garfield brilliantly plays Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist Christian who served as a U.S. army medic in the Second World War but refused to bear arms. He was the first conscientious objector …
Well, the verdict is in. After a meticulous search through eight million books published between 1776 and 2009 for positive words such as ‘enjoyment’, ‘peace’ and ‘happiness’, researchers at Warwick University have concluded that 1957 was the happiest year in modern history.
Genealogy is all the rage. There are plenty of websites and search companies to help: some search birth and death, migration and marriage, council and electoral records for you; others even investigate your DNA.
Why the reading for the Annunciation five days out from the Nativity.
The recent sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia for a record $A591M drew renewed attention to all Leonardo’s works.
Episode 8 is coming. When I was your age, in my last year of school, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, the first Star Wars film was released.
The Season of Advent has been celebrated since around the fourth century AD when Christmas was fixed on 25 December.
On the centenary of the apparitions at Lourdes, Pope Pius XII published his encyclical Le Pelegrinage de Lourdes from which I would like to quote a few lines…
