Lord Rothschild’s Legacies
Our daily media diet of murder and massacre in the Middle East carries on the history of more than four thousand years. Readers with a regularly well-thumbed Bible will need no guidance to the scores of horrible examples set out in the Old Testament; others, perhaps able to retrieve a Bible from somewhere beneath the dust of a back shelf, may take (simply as a reference at random) the last two chapters (20 and 21) of the Book of Judges.
There the ethnic cleansing of the day is illustrated by “smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children”. And indeed this was promptly done, except that a hundred virgins were preserved for other purposes. In those backward Bronze Age times they lacked the refinements of guided missiles, rockets and high explosive. But they deserve full credit for the sweeping results obtained by simple old fire and sword, slingshot and club. Nevertheless, there was an uncanny foreshadowing of today’s “roadside…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
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23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
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2 mins