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Keywords: Mortal Life

  • RELIGION

    Homily for John Eddy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 11 November 2011
    5 Comments

    Asked 'How are you?', John would caress his scalp, straighten his hat, adjust his cuffs, massage his moustache, purse his lips, and answer, 'I'm headed for Grand Central. But I don't know when this service is due to arrive.' He never did meet Stalin, but thought he had met just about everyone else of significance on the planet.

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  • RELIGION

    Making friends not foes of rights and religion

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 September 2011
    5 Comments

    The Church of the 21st century should be the exemplar of due process, natural justice and transparency. While there can be little useful critique of the final decision of Pope Benedict to force the early retirement of Bishop Bill Morris, there is plenty of scope to review the processes leading up to it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Catholicism at high speed

    • TIm Kroenert
    • 18 August 2011
    5 Comments

    Accused of conflating his Catholic faith with indestructibility, Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna responds, ominously, that he is ever conscious of his own mortality. His story is a tragedy of the highest order. You don't need to be a racing fan to be deeply affected by it.

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  • RELIGION

    Human rights and Christian lawyers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 18 July 2011
    5 Comments

    When I appeared on Q&A with Christopher Hitchens, a young man asked whether we can 'ever hope to live in a truly secular society' while the religious continue to 'affect political discourse and decision making' on euthanasia, same-sex unions and abortion. Hitchens was simpaticao. I was dumbstruck.

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  • RELIGION

    Christmas in Islam

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 December 2010
    13 Comments

    The Gospels describe Christmas as a time of great happiness that a saviour has been born. But they also intimate the murderous business through which salvation will come. This Christmas many Christians in Muslim nations will be shadowed by fear.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Andrew Hamilton and Peter Steele: boys with writing in their blood

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 December 2010

    As I reflect back now, I can see the difference between Peter's urge to write and my own. My hero was the master of terseness, Tacitus. But Peter wanted to find words, and ways of putting words together, that could unfold the shape of what lay beyond words.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What is forever

    • Various
    • 28 September 2010
    1 Comment

    The earth and its mortal crust .. Like our own skin .. Covers something .. Which at one point .. Was not .. And in some distant point .. Far beyond this evening .. Will no longer be

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Weapon on a train

    • A. Frances Johnson
    • 21 September 2010
    1 Comment

    extracted .. from a small black bag .. on a peak hour train .. Held sharp and confident as a new razor .. against the shunt and shuck .. of the carriage .. Throwback to industrial tortures .. held against the soft wet eye

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Staking out our vampire fetish

    • Brian Matthews
    • 11 August 2010
    1 Comment

    For all our modern sophistication, refinement and technology, we remain in imaginative thrall to one of the most venerable and terrifying of folk figures. The vampire combines two of human kind's profoundly obsessive preoccupations: mortality and sex.

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  • RELIGION

    The Church as advocate in the public square

    • Frank Brennan
    • 09 February 2010

    'Tonight I want to reflect in light of the National Human Rights Consultation how we as Church can do better in promoting justice for all in our land. Full text from Frank Brennan's 2010 McCosker Oration, 'The Church as Advocate in the Public Square: Lessons from the National Human Rights Consultation'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2009: Michael Jackson's tragic gift

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 14 January 2010
    1 Comment

    When celebrities die, public grief is disproportionate, because death reasserts the humanity of one who has seemed beyond it. Jackson had become so far removed from his humanity that the shock of his mortality is even more profound. June 2009

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  • RELIGION

    Patient autonomy and the doctor's conscience

    • Frank Brennan
    • 18 September 2009
    4 Comments

    In Life and Death: How do we honour the Patient's Autonomy and the Doctor's Conscience? Frank Brennan's Sandra David Oration at St Vincent's Clinic, Darlinghurst, Sydney, 17 September 2009.

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