Macklemore performs on stage at the Goldencoast Rap Festival in Corcelles-les-Monts on 3o August 2026. Photograph: Arnaud Finistre/AFP/Getty Images By Rod Benson The controversy surrounding Macklemore’s recent removal from the remaining U.S. dates of Ed Sheeran’s 2026 Loop tour raises a question extending far beyond one rapper, one pop star or one geopolitical conflict. Should musicians use concert …
Artistic freedom, religious freedom, and the sacred
Recent controversy surrounding Sydney’s Divine Playhouse has reopened an enduring and vexed question within liberal democracies: Should artistic freedom extend to the deliberate parody of religious symbols held sacred by millions of believers? Responding to performances and promotional material that appropriated Catholic imagery—including references to the Eucharist and the sacrament of confession—Archbishop Anthony Fisher argued …
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Theology and imagination in Robert Musil’s works
Robert Musil is one of the least widely read of the great European modernist writers, yet his work occupies a distinctive place in twentieth-century intellectual culture. His fiction is neither conventionally religious nor militantly anti-religious. It explores the spiritual exhaustion of modern civilisation, the collapse of moral certainty, and the persistent human longing for transcendence …
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