Artistic freedom, religious freedom, and the sacred

Recent controversy surrounding Sydneyโ€™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 imageryโ€”including references to the Eucharist and the sacrament of confessionโ€”Archbishop Anthony Fisher argued …

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 …