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Keywords: Lay Leadership

  • AUSTRALIA

    The public, the Church, and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.

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  • EDUCATION

    Paradox and possibility: The example of Francis

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'You are the first generation of Catholic educators who will not have members of religious orders or congregations present in any number at all in your staff rooms and in your classrooms. Thus the need for lay Catholic educators to cultivate their spirituality while also being attentive to the demands of Church and the Church hierarchy.' 6th International Conference on Catholic Educational Leadership, Sydney, 13 August 2013.

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  • RELIGION

    Pope Francis' three types of intelligence

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 18 July 2013
    31 Comments

    When policies affect people's lives, imaginative intelligence should come first into play. It is the inclination to see people, not simply as the objects of policy, but as persons each with their own face and life story. The Pope exemplified this when he visited Lampedusa, 'Italy's Christmas Island', to mourn the dead and console the living. And in so doing he stated the priority for others.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Canberra's life of lies

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 02 July 2013
    9 Comments

    Kevin Rudd says he wants to purify politics, and make it kinder and more honest. And yet his own standards when it comes to telling the truth are at least as rubbery as Tony Abbott's. Politicians who tell us they are acting for the higher good or that their brand of dishonesty is less egregious than that of their opponents are deluded and dangerous.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pragmatic answers to the asylum seeker question

    • Frank Brennan
    • 27 June 2013
    10 Comments

    'I want to outline the contours for a better approach — better than forcibly turning around boats, better than transporting people to Nauru and Manus Island or to Malaysia to join an asylum queue of 100,000 or permitting people to reside in the Australian community but without work rights and with inadequate welfare provision.' Frank Brennan speaks at the Australian Catholic University National Asylum Summit 2013.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abuse cover-ups perpetuated priestly mystique

    • Ray Cassin
    • 29 May 2013
    66 Comments

    One consequence of mandatory celibacy has been the creation of a priestly mystique: a notion that the priest is a man set apart. When bishops say that cover-ups were attempts to avoid 'scandal', they are really talking about their fear of what might happen if priests were no longer thought to be special.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hope for a Malaysian Spring

    • Lily Zubaidah Rahim and Sven Schottmann
    • 29 April 2013
    1 Comment

    Amid democratic transitions in Asia and protest movements in the Middle East, a growing number of Malaysians are unwilling to countenance any further their government's paternalistic politics. Whoever wins next Sunday's election will have the task of forging a new consensus on what it means to be Malaysian. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Turkey's Kurdish Spring

    • William Gourlay
    • 12 April 2013
    3 Comments

    A public letter from the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), declared that PKK insurgents should forego armed struggle against the Turkish military. An end to terror is one thing, but there is a way to go before Turkey's Kurds have the rights and freedoms they've long hankered for. 

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  • RELIGION

    Secular scrutiny can save the Church

    • Michael Kelly
    • 18 January 2013
    40 Comments

    Too often the Church acts as if Catholics have a right to legislate their morality for everyone else. Now the boot is on the other foot and Catholics are being told their Church has to smarten itself up. It won't be the first time in the life of the Australian Church that external intervention has produced far more than was initially intended.

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  • RELIGION

    Rejection of women bishops is not terminal

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 26 November 2012
    30 Comments

    Last Saturday the Rev. Ellinah Wamukoya was ordained as bishop of Swaziland. Most eyes in Australia however were on the Church of England's General Synod, which stumbled at the threshold of a change that would have embraced the consecration of women bishops. This may prove to be the less significant story.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Trading fears for tears in complex asylum seeker debate

    • Fatima Measham
    • 11 July 2012
    16 Comments

    The tear-shedding in parliament over people drowning near our northwest coast was astonishing. In a decade that has seen asylum seekers demonised by policymakers, the reversal was nearly comical: asylum seekers, it turns out, are human beings. It illustrates how poorly the question of asylum has been discussed since 2001.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Knowing the needs of refugees

    • Susan Metcalfe
    • 27 June 2012
    22 Comments

    It should be mandatory for anyone writing on asylum seekers to spend time visiting detention centres. Many commentators ignore the hard work of those who have. Moreover the politicians are too poll driven to even explain the human desperation that leads to boat journeys.

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