Smiling pope returns to Vatican after cancer surgery
Pope Leo XIV's discharge on Saturday, four days after undergoing lung cancer surgery, ended a stretch of uncertainty that shook the Vatican and the world's 1.4 billion Catholics, less than two years into the Chicago-born pope's papacy.
Wikipedia often gets taken for granted – but its history is fascinating, and its future is fragile
Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago. Continue reading...
The kindness of strangers: After my wife died, a football club made an extraordinary gesture
My son had only played two seasons for St Mary’s Greensborough, five years earlier. I don’t know how they even got our new address but they took the time to send him a care package * Read more in the kindness of strangers series Footy clubs, and the AFL specifically, have a lot to answer for in terms of sexism. I’ve been a part of them for a lot of my life and have been disappointed by their behaviours more than once. When we lived in Melbourne many years ago, my son played a couple of seasons for St Mary’s Greensborough. Unfortunately for him, I secured a job in central Queensland and moved the family north. Continue reading...
The upside of anger: can fury be one of the deepest forms of human compassion? | Making sense of it
Imagine anger as a sign not of moral failure or justified outrage but the desire to care for another * Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life Anger is an emotion we are taught to manage, control and suppress. But what if anger is, as poet David Whyte says, one of the deepest possible forms of compassion available to humankind? Philosophers and theologians have long distinguished between virtuous and non-virtuous anger. Aristotle defined anger as “a desire, accompanied by pain, for apparent retribution, aroused by an apparent, undeserved slighting against oneself or those connected to oneself”. Continue reading...
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