Tag: Reviews

This year marks 40 years since the debut of smash hit musical Les Misérables and to celebrate the production is doing a world tour, which will hit Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane in the month of May.  

In the Catholic community, St Patrick’s Day in Australia is a solemnity, a day to remember the Irish saint who cleared the Emerald Isles of snakes and taught them about the Trinity. This year a first-time Irish musical festival was added to Sydney’s celebrations.

Despite the Sister Act musical’s strong production values, with slick sets and a talented cast with amazing vocals, the production leaves behind the hymns and heart of the original story makes for a forgettable experience.

Catholic Weekly columnist Fr John Flader hits his nine hundredth question answered in his latest volume from Connor Court: Question Time 6. With a foreword from the late Cardinal George Pell, Fr Flader makes short work of complex queries, suitable for educational and evangelical purposes, writes Eamonn Keane.

Ascension Press is attracting some attention for "Envision," their newly updated Theology of the Body (TOB) program for teenagers. With recognisable names like Jason Evert, Sister of Life Sr Mary Grace and others, the series gives teenagers an answer to the fundamental questions we all have.

Madeleine Delbrêl was a French Catholic poet and mystic who founded a lay community devoted to living with and serving the poor during the Great Depression. Her key writings, published for the first time in English, reveal a startlingly contemporary call to discipleship and sanctity right for the ordinary person

There is no way out of the church and world’s conflict over sexual ethics—only a way through, according to George Mason University’s Helen Alvaré, who will deliver the 2024 Tim Fischer Oration next month.

Australia tends to forget its cultural and literary figures, and our greatest Catholic novelist Christopher Koch is no different. The tenth anniversary of his death was passed over in silence last September—but Koch remains one of our great storytellers and subtle chroniclers of Western Christianity’s predicament, writes Lucas Smith.

Season four’s finale takes time before Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem to show how everything that came before, every miracle, doubt and debate, has led to a people who are as ready to condemn their Messiah as they are to crown him.

The raising of Lazarus in episode 7 sets up crucial storylines and character development that will shape the retelling of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection in the upcoming seasons.

Two new books from Connor Court Publishing give long-overdue postmortems of last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum. Damien Freeman and Fr Frank Brennan SJ have given us some of the most extensive appraisals of its defeat to date, avoiding simple blame-laying and taking a broader view of why things went wrong.

Though episode six is something of a “bottle episode,” it fleshes out the theme of Jesus as the good shepherd through the interactions between the disciples, who have come together to celebrate Hanukkah.