Professional Historian and History Consultancy Services Brisbane
Category: Blog
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Sartre on Humanism – Annotated. CRT No. 2
The task on hand is to overcome misunderstandings of humanism, in the same way that Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to overcome misunderstandings of existentialism; explained in his ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism.’ It is beneficial to examine Jean-Paul Sartre’s statements on humanism, and to rethink on what is meant by humanism. Sartre provided one version, but it…
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The Framing of Signs and Wonders. Series CRT No. 1
This short post is the first in the blog series, Concepts in Religious Thought. ***** One of the advantage for old age, as a scholar, is that you frequently have the ‘eureka’ moment. “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh:…
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Has the History and Philosophy Schools lost it in the New World of Online Learning and Community Education?
“The Engineering & Design Institute, known as TEDI-London, which believes that its mix of online learning and collaborative hands-on tutorial teaching, allied with deep industry links, will prove a hit with students and would-be employers alike.” So, stated in the The Higher Education (THE) online email summary which arrives daily in my Inbox. Something is…
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Cult-Like Separatism With A Public Face
Cult-Like Separatist Christianity never went away. It appears little has changed from the early days’ of 1920s fundamentalism and the first megachurches, but there is now a major change – institutions have had, in the last half century, a public face that attempts to mitigate accusations, from and to, ‘the world’ and, from and to,…
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Defining a Broad-Humanist Outlook: A Summary of Pew Research Center Report, What Makes Life Meaningful? (18 November 2021) From an Australian Perspective
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the broad-humanist outlook which exists across multiple worldviews of actual thinking persons, by way of a summary of the Pew Research Center’s report, entitled “What Makes Life Meaningful? Views From 17 Advanced Economies.” The report is produced by Laura Silver, Patrick van Kessel, Christine Huang, Laura Clancy…
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Uncooked Lamb: Over-clever humorous Propaganda
Any serious historian or a sociologist in the broad Australian Studies areas must be puzzled at the messaging of the recent Australian Lamb promotional video, and the, alas, popular response on social media. We have been here before, so many times. Clever? or humorous propaganda, à la Morrison’s Where the Bloody Hell Are You? as…
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The First Week of 2022
The first week of 2022, of “Januray,” as the artist wrote (image below), has passed, indeed! In Australia, after the first week of January in the new year, in the Covid-19 numbers we have 381,269 active cases, 3,979 hospitalised, 275 in ICU, and 2,319 total deaths (as of 10:30 AEST, 8 Jan 22). “Why,” we…
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What Does It Mean for Brisbane as a City?
The Kangaroo Point and Districts History Group recently raised questions on what Brisbane had become as a city since Conrad Martens’ image in 1851, “Brisbane Views from Bowen Terrace Looking across Kangaroo Point.” I believe that the Council and the city’s residents need to wrestle with that question intelligently. This is very different to how…
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Stan Grant’s Article on Tutu, Nietzsche, and the End of History
Stan Grant writes: “Our ‘historical fever’, Nietzsche said, ‘may bring about the decay of a people’. If history becomes sovereign, he wrote, it ‘would constitute a kind of final closing out of the accounts of life for mankind’. Isn’t this what we see in our world now?” and “We cannot just ‘move on’. We live…
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Poetry of a Lonely in the Compassionate Crowd
Poetry of a Lonely in the Compassionate Crowd On the evening of the 12 November 2021, 8.30. Fish out of water. Showcase of communications, In art and films. Always the question – What am I doing here? I get an email invitation Out of the blue. So, I came. I did not conquer. I looked.…