Diversity, tradition and family : Australian same-sex attracted parents and their families

This paper describes the diversity of family forms within a sample of 455 families parented by same-sex couples and same-sex attracted sole parents from Australia and New Zealand. Around one-third of this sample had conceived at least one of their children while in a previous heterosexual relationship. The remaining two-thirds had conceived at least one child within a same-sex relationship or while they were single. Among this group, the largest proportion was women who conceived using home-based self-insemination with a known donor. A smaller proportion of women had conceived through clinic-based insemination or assisted reproduction with a known or unknown donor. There were 60 male participants in the sample. Around 20% of these men were raising children they had conceived through a surrogacy arrangement; the rest had conceived their children within previous heterosexual relationships or through donor arrangements with single women or lesbians. Around 50% of participants described their family form in terms of a two-parent model, where they and their partner were their children's only parents. Around 34% were sharing care of their children with ex-partners, either a previous heterosexual (opposite sex) partner or a previous same-sex partner. Around 10% described themself as their child's sole parent. In large part, participants in this study were not creating radically new family formations, with around half of all participants describing their family in terms of a two-parent ‘nuclear’ model, albeit a model involving parents of the same gender. However, pathways to conception and/or parenthood did reflect nontraditional patterns.

Tradition as a topic of philosophic interest in Britain in the 1940s

Between 1945 and 1948, Michael Polanyi, Michael Oakeshott, and Karl Popper respectively discussed the nature of tradition, and the part that traditions play in free societies. This article analyzes these thinkers’ ideas of tradition. Polanyi depicted tradition as knowledge that is embodied in skilled practice, and tradition for Oakeshott consists in activities that are suffused with practical knowledge and technique. Popper emphasized rational criticizability, whereas Polanyi and Oakeshott emphasized the tacit dimension of traditions.

The western humanist tradition

In this essay, I describe the development of at least three traditions of humanism: the Platonic, the Aristotelian, and the Promethean. These traditions have developed and intermingled so as to produce the complex and multifaceted face of humanism today. The first, Platonic tradition involves a turning away from the world in order to find wisdom and spirituality in a metaphysical realm. The Aristotelian tradition stresses the need to be at home in the world and happy in life even as we contemplate their unchangeable realities. It speaks of the perfectibility of human beings in muted tones and shows a reverence for the changeable world, as well as for the fragile, vulnerable, fallible, and mortal condition of being human. However, it is the Promethean tradition, with its celebration of science, progress, and technology, that has had the greatest effect upon modern civilization and spirituality. The culmination of these various streams of thought was the Enlightenment: a movement that its greatest philosopher, Immanuel Kant, interpreted as giving humanity permission, for the first time, to think for itself. But the Enlightenment leads to a disenchanted world in which spirituality seems to have no place. I argue that my subjectivity is a transcendent reality and that our very subjectivity becomes a real self and a social being insofar as it is drawn towards the Other. Accordingly, a humanist spirituality is possible in the form of reverence, love, and humility in the presence of transcendence. While religions give the names of their gods to this transcendence, humanism gives it other names: Subjectivity, the Other, Beauty, Goodness, and Truth.

Rationalism and tradition: The Popper–Oakeshott conversation

In 1948 Karl Popper sent a copy of his paper, ‘Utopia and Violence’, to Michael Oakeshott. Popper had recently read Oakeshott’s essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’, appreciating its relevance to views he had expressed in The Open Society. Oakeshott wrote to Popper at some length, explaining his thoughts about reason, tradition and kindred matters, to which Popper responded. This paper reproduces these letters and discusses them with reference to pertinent writings of Popper and Oakeshott. While showing there was much common ground between the two men and that they significantly influenced each other, the writings reveal important differences over the role of reason and tradition in social and political life.

Translating the gothic tradition: St Patrick's Cathedral Melbourne

During the 1850s, England and France were the leading centres of debate over the Gothic Revival. As Barry Bergdoll argues, the issues that loomed large were at once architectural and political: stylistic eclecticism versus national purity, invention versus tradition, nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, as well as the challenge of new building programmes and new materials to the historicist logic of the Gothic Revival position. William Wilkinson Wardell (1823-99), the architect of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (1858-97) found himself in the midst of this debate. ln.,1858, Wardell's client, James Alipius Goold, Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Melbourne, found that local circumstances significantly influenced his aspirations for a new Catholic cathedral for Melbourne. The choices Wardell made eventually gave shape to the Gothic Revival in Australia.The New World perhaps echoing Didron, demanded of the past all it could offer the present and especially the future: a Gothic cathedral was deemed a fitting carrier of the principles, morals, beliefs and spirit of a Christian civilisation. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Britain and Europe, Wardell in Australia was to see his Gothic Cathedrals of St Patrick's and St Mary's substantially realised in his lifetime. This paper presents a building history of Wardell's St Patrick's, Melbourne, and critically examines the translations which are embedded in the design and fabric of this nineteenth-century Gothic revival cathedral.