Last Christmas, my generous and book-loving husband gave me a reprint of a now-classic book. The book, The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation, by the eminent Italo-German priest and theologian Fr Romano Guardini (1885-1968), has been reprinted by the Brooklyn-based publishers, Angelico Press. The cover art designed by Angelico Press is evocative. It…
There was a sense of a convivial but important moment in the room earlier this week in Melbourne. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the launch of Dr Kevin Donnelly’s edition of Defend the West: The Culture of Freedom with my husband, Anthony. The room was studded with an impressive array of personalities. Some…
In 1943, Australia was living in the shadow of World War II which it had entered as a nation in 1939 under prime minister Robert Menzies. The global war against tyranny had become all too real for Australia. In 1942 there was the Japanese bombing of Darwin and other parts of the northwest of Australia.…
An experienced and grounded mental health professional remarked in an informal and recent conversation: “Everyone I speak with is weary and anxious … they are certainly not ready for 2025.” I have noticed this phenomenon. Even though time waits for not one of us, it seems that we are being pushed to a threshold of…
When I was young, I often wondered how it was that my father, Francis Xavier Duffy (1927-99) – a father of 11 children with a travelling full-time profession, a garage full of furniture repair and making, and a garden that was as close to self-sufficient as one-fourth of an acre in the city could afford…
My last public appearance for the Thomas More Centre in 2024 was a joyful one. It started with an invitation from Katrina Currell (from St Joseph’s Catholic Church, Timboon) to talk about the vision and the work of the Thomas More Centre with representatives from Christian churches in the southwestern Victorian town of Timboon. It…
In an intriguing and lyrical short poem, the Nobel Prize-winning, Anglo-Irish, Celtic-revivalist poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) in The Seven Sages grazes over the passing on of tangible wisdom, humility and narrative from one generation to the next. In the poem Yeats published in 1933 after the bloody Civil War in Ireland, he sets up…
The weeks in the wake of the American celebration of Thanksgiving are always salutary for us in Australia. We so often think of ourselves as self-made or we take our good fortune lazily for granted. Actually, it is impossible to take the life of the Thomas More Centre for granted. There have been so many…
In 1989, the writer Paul Gray published an intriguing interview in the AD2000 journal in which he asks the great agnostic late 20th-century Polish philosopher, Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009), to comment upon the state and role of the Catholic Church. He answered plainly that the role of the Church was “the salvation of souls” and that…
In a simple brochure about the Thomas More Centre, we try to convey something of a potted overview of the mission and aims of the TMC. We explain that the TMC is a “formational movement” that aims to foster “the common good” in the development of an “integrated and balanced Christian humanism and social ethics”. Some people…