We dignify the runner who completes the race but dies exhausted at its end; we sorrow for the one who quits mid-course. Suicide silences life’s calling and shuts the book, abandons hope and blows out the candle. To lend strength and dignity to the ly ill is to have those virtues returned in full, a thing no suicide can ever do

Talking about demons and angels outside church is scarcely respectable at all. But on the other side of a world in darkness there is light and an enchanted world of saints and heroes, and countless acts of love. Humanity has been living with its demons and its angels for a very long time

Now that the COVID panicdemic has receded and state borders are open, the Streeton exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW is well worth any journey, no matter how far, to revel in the artist's capture of that unique Australian light falling on the landscapes he loved

Will Longstaff’s painting of the memorial to the missing at Ypres, the legions of the dead marching in their grey batallions from unknown graves, proved a sensation when it toured the capitals. For those very many Australians who could not afford the voyage to mourn their kin on the distant soil where they fell, it offered a pilgrimage of the spirit

Probus, a very careful Roman writer, declared the golden youth's death a murder and with good reason. No body, absent witnesses, reports of lacerations and torn garments -- no coroner would approve such a finding, not with human sacrifice a pointedly unexplored possibility

Chess offers no excuses. You start with equal forces. All pieces are visible and every move is chosen. The death of your king is entirely your fault -- unless, that is, your opponent succumbs to a lust for greatness as old as Adam and Eve and enters the tournament with a computer concealed in his shoe

Saint Barbara might be simply a woman martyred for believing in Christ, like others in Baalbek whom we do not know and never will. Only the extraordinary story has kept her alive, offering a glimpse into the mysteries of existence, suffering and hope

We have no need to revise, let alone erase, Governor Hercules Robinson’s judgement when he unveiled Thomas Woolner's towering statue of James Cook’s statue in Hyde Park. Cook salutes a country full of promise. He welcomes all who look upon him, whatever their origins

Today, we respect and readily set apart the holy or sacred sites of local Aboriginal cultures, but we seem reluctant or embarrassed to use the word ‘sacred’ about other sites in our countryside. The colonial artist Eugene von Guerard’s 'Mt William from Mt Dryden' reveals what a sacred landscape looks like and what it means