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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #186
In this week’s ABR Podcast, Scott Stephens reviews a book by Anne Manne: Crimes of the Crimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice. Why is narcissism a central theme for a book about child sexual abuse? Stephens writes: ‘without the capacity or willingness to be attentive to the humanity of another person’, unfathomable cruelty becomes possible. Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. Listen to Scott Stephens’s ‘Soul blindness: Clerical narcissism and unfathomable cruelty’, published in the May issue of ABR.
Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks, / in the gardens, under a shade sail, / my father is crying about Winston Churchill. / Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel ...
... (read more)In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair / garlanded by summer hibiscus / like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche. / A flowering wreath buzzes around his head – ...
... (read more)To hell with what you think of me.
I’ve started drinking martinis at three.
I wake, I walk, I write, I sleep.
I snooze the alarm. I doze. I read.
As my plane drops down in turbulence
I think of you and of Salt Lake City,
I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes
and of Omaha and of adamant plains.
... (read more)