Abe W. Ata

Bereavement anxieties and health amongst the Australian-Italian Catholic community

This article is based on survey of 269 households in the state of Victoria, Australia. It elicits some useful guidelines for professional caregivers in relation to eight cultural/religious groups including Australian-born Christians and Arab-born Muslims. The focus here is upon the relationships between the Australian Italian community and personal health outcomes during bereavement. The following sub-strata are examined: community differences in relation to grief and loss practices and traditions; the value of religious communal support and counseling; symptomatological differences from psychosocial and educational perspectives; psychopathological/psychiatric symptoms and beliefs and practice concerning the afterlife. Significant differences were revealed between the sexes on such matters as health problems, grief expressions, psychosomatic manifestations, communication with the dead, beliefs in the afterlife and interpretation of the meaning of loss. Differences in these findings will assist professional caregivers who deal with families experiencing personal death loss to broaden their own perspectives on bereavement, offering specific counselling strategies and care-giving interventions.

Entrapping Christian and Muslim Arabs in racial cartoons in Australia : the other anti-semitism

Racial Cartoons are a powerful force disguised as entertainment operating to shape public opinion. During the 1980s, 1990s and after 9/11 in 2001, cartoons in the Australian press were particularly directed against Muslim and Christian Arabs without remorse or fear of redress or accountability. The offensive of such cartoons has essentially been directed on three fronts—oil, politics and religion. The drawback resulting from socio-cultural, historical and other differences are no doubt visible; but equally obvious is that anti-Semitism, which was directed against the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, is today mostly directed against the public relations deprived, opinion silenced and undemocratically governed, ethnically diverse Arabs. It is argued in this paper that several forces were behind such distorted visual strategies adopted by the Australian press. Pre-judgement stemming from an inbuilt bias of the cartoonist, or highlighting characteristics which conform to the national interest are likely factors. The debate in Australia as to whether public images and attitudes of a minority “cause” or “determine” policy or whether policy itself changes attitudes is still resting with the jury.

Mental Anxieties, Bereavement, and Communication with the Dead Amongst Australian-Born

ABSTRACT This article is based on survey of 269 households in the state of Victoria, Australia; 62 household of these are Australian born of a Christian background. This investigation tackles a much neglected, somewhat taboo and difficult area of family life and compares them with other religious and cultural groups: Significant differences were found with regards to health problems, grief expressions and practices, psychosomatic manifestations, communication with the dead, beliefs in the afterlife and interpretation of the meaning of loss. These findings offer a positive care-giving interventions and hopeful understanding of these issues in multicultural societies like ours.

Research note: how Muslims are perceived in Catholic schools in contemporary Australia: a national survey

Abstract This paper presents results from a large-scale national survey of attitudes of students in Catholic schools in Australia towards Muslims and Islam. Over 2232 students completed questionnaires which were obtained from students in 42 Catholic schools throughout Australia. These schools were drawn from both rural and urban areas in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland and South Western Australia. The findings include evidence of goodwill on several indicators, with a variation in response between boys and girls, religious identifiers and ‘others’, and stereotyping of one’s own mainstream/Catholic community vs. Muslims. Positive, neutral and other stereotypical attitudes were included in the analysis. A number of negative attitudes suggest that relative recent migration to Australia contributed in large measure to a poorly informed response, while the long-standing multicultural posture of educational policy suggests otherwise.

Observing different faiths, learning about ourselves : practice with inter-married muslims and christians.

Abstract The present article offers practitioners initial ideas for work with clients in mixed-faith relationships. Based on local, empirical research that investigated Muslim–Christian marriages, six patterns of adaptation to a mixed-faith marriage are outlined. In addition, from a practice-oriented review of the data, four questions are identified that can be used by practitioners to clarify their thinking and practice focus. Increasingly technical, these reference questions are: (i) how is the public–private divide being understood and managed; (ii) how is identity and selfhood being practiced; (iii) how may practitioners position themselves with respect to asymmetries related to gender; and (iv) should religious differences be reframed? Rather than practitioners seeking to be experts on the other, the belief animating the current contribution is that work with diverse clients offers workers a mirror upon which we practitioners can better observe our own outlines. In contrast with the pursuit of imperial generalisations, the authors of the present study commend the benefits of reflectively denaturalising our own positions.