There is a problem of ethnic persecution in Sri Lanka. The civil war, which began in 1983, was forged by the persecution of Tamil communities, and when the civil war ended in 2010, it was terminated in violent acts that targeted the ethnic Tamil minority.

I’d been writing about Burma for some years but it wasn’t until actually going there for the 2010 election and being with the people themselves that the full nature of their experience began to come clear.’

Californian writer and academic Aaron Bady continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. See more of Aaron Bady’s work at zunguzungu, where this piece was originally published. Ignorance and the moral fabric of the American state Last November, Hillary Clinton responded to WikiLeaks’ […]

Politics and Religion in the New Century Philip Quadrio and Carrol Besseling (eds) Sydney University Press Any critical engagement with the politics of religious discourse that begins by acknowledging Al Swearangen and Joe Strummer has to be worth more than a second look. At least I’ve made the assumption that is the Joe Strummer and […]

Progressive Jewish Australians, such as academic Ned Curthoys and journalist Antony Loewenstein, both published in Overland, along with Michael Brull, one of Overland’s regular bloggers, have written a statement appealing to Australia’s major political parties to publicly and unequivocally denounce Islamophobia: As progressive Jewish Australians we are deeply disturbed by the recent outbreak of politically […]

When I read The Ecstasy Of Owen Muir at the age of 14 what stood out was the opulence, vanity and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. How, I wondered, had it become so much bigger than its boots? And how had Catholicism become such a schmick business, such a powerful entity, such a gross version (in my mind at least) of the doctrine of Christ?

Graeme Blundell, in his assessment of the public broadcasting station SBS, blithely observed that ‘turning thirty is difficult’. A couple of weeks ago Insight on SBS demonstrated just that. The program exhibited the fraught politics and murky ideological realities present when it comes to issues of religion and its place within Australia’s multicultural landscape, but […]

There has been a resurgence of interest out there on the blogs about Buddhism, its Western interpretations, and the various statements of the provocative Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the subject. To represent Zizek’s opinions is to take aim at a moving target, as he develops them over time, dialectically, and often contradicts himself even […]

Talk of banning the burqa is twisting some civil rights knickers again. This time in South Australia. What I find interesting is that people (on all sides of this debate) seem to think legislating against something that makes large groups of society uncomfortable is outrageously novel. But it happens all the time. By law, I […]

In the wake of Synthetic Genomics’ dramatic achievement, ‘playing God’ was the predictable cry in the media. The verb is misleading. It implies that whereas God works, Venter and his colleagues are merely playing; a blasphemous mockery, the trifling mimicry of a monkey, carrying out the form of creation while missing its content of the […]

Last month in Switzerland, a mountain guide owned up to desecrating crosses along the mountain trails near Gruyere and was subsequently arrested. The mountain guide declared he acted because he wanted to start a public debate about the relevance of crosses in the mountain setting. He believes the cross to be a symbol of death, […]

Suddenly the world is awash in burqa suspicion and vitriol. In the past fortnight, headlines have been dominated by bans and proposed bans in Belgium, France and Denmark (home to only three women who wear the burqa), to our own shores, and the boorish postulating of Cory Bernardi: In my mind, the burka has no […]

It is said that popular culture is becoming increasingly infantilising. JK Rowling made it acceptable for adults to sit on the train reading a book about magical boarding schools, infused with the nostalgia of books from our own childhoods (Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising), but the process was already well underway […]

In case you weren’t aware, the ever charming, frypan-hating Richard Dawkins is in the country. (If you are unfamiliar with Dawkins, he’s the man God created to illustrate irony.) The Dawks has been appearing around the place getting his knickers in a twist about people who think there might be things science just can’t explain, […]

In Australia, Sam Harris doesn’t seem to be terribly well known. In the USA, however, he’s one of the big names of the New Atheism. Which is a pity, since his book The End of Faith is something of a shocker. Like the other New Atheists, Harris is good at exposing the contradictions and cruelties […]