Soul Search

In the past it’s been a joke to put Jedi as your religion on the census, but there are people who practise Star Wars-inspired faiths quite seriously. It turns out, people really do take things from fiction and incorporate them into their spiritual lives, either as modern mythology, or even as full-blown religious systems.

The Satanic Panic was a time of incredible anxiety in the United States – and Australia. This special feature examines how games like Dungeons and Dragons and books like Harry Potter became unlikely villains in a war over religion, politics and imagination.

Funerals have been front and centre these past few weeks. The rituals we use to memorialise the dead are only one part of the story – what about the material things we use to mark the life of someone who has died?

How do deserts shape our sense of the sacred? For centuries people have found deserts spiritually transformative – not just for individuals but for whole communities.

Sidney Nolan is best known for his Ned Kelly series and Anzac portraits, but secretly, privately, he also painted around 200 works about the Holocaust. They’re now display in Australia for the first time at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

Is human life bound to planet earth? If so, what does that mean for our ambitions to colonise space? Even our fledgling space exploration has caused damage to the near-earth environment, so space ethicists are beginning to advocate for space conservation, too.

“Once upon a time” is a familiar beginning for tales of adventure and heroism. But if stories also capture and pass on to our kids what we know of the world, can a story help broach the reality of death – our own, and those of the people we love?

According to a 2021 study by Monash University, 99% of phone users experience ‘nomophobia’: the fear of being without our phones. But we’re also living in a loneliness crisis, according to the experts. So what are the spiritual costs to ourselves and our communities when we seek connection through our devices, rather than in each other?

Climate Change. One of the biggest global challenges of our time.

We all know trees are important for the environment – to clean the air and hold the soil together, but for many people they’re also important for spirituality and culture.