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Keywords: Seamus Heaney

  • AUSTRALIA

    40 Days: Generosity

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 March 2024

    Generosity is most heartwarming when it is a habit. We see it in people whose first inclination is to give something to a beggar, to stop and listen to a hard luck story, to think first of persons affected by war and economic crises and only secondly to policy, to welcome people into their homes and to go out of their way to help.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Literature's power is in self not identity

    • Mark Tredinnick
    • 31 August 2023
    3 Comments

    Amid shifting perceptions and the fluidity of names, our understanding of self  dances on the edge of subjectivity. Traversing the landscape of literature, we're invited to confront our own reflections, to ask what truly defines us in a world that is ever-evolving, and to look beyond the obvious and into the heart of our shared human experience.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our frightening times

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 08 November 2022
    8 Comments

    There are a great many despairing people about, with parents of children fearing they have no future; believing that by the time they are grown up the world as we know it will have ceased to exist. Floods, drought, wars, pandemics, climate change. In a world ever smaller and more connected, encouragement is needed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why does poetry matter?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 August 2022
    11 Comments

    In most circles poetry doesn’t matter. It doesn’t put bread on the table, nor raise people to revolt nor even make news unless a grizzled footballer is outed for secretly writing poems. Even in churches poems and hymns are altered to improve their orthodoxy in matters of faith, gender, race or modernity, but rarely their poetic quality.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Literature's power is in self not identity

    • Mark Tredinnick
    • 30 September 2019
    11 Comments

    I'm a white man in a white man's world, his mother tongue the lingua franca everywhere. I may not be rich, but I am more or less free, and my calling has let me travel the world. It's easy for me, not having had to fight for mine, to ask us to go deeper than identity when we write. But when James Baldwin says the same thing, it compels.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ismene in transit

    • Lisa Brockwell
    • 18 June 2019
    6 Comments

    The women are not veiled, the men don't stop to look at the golden boys kicking footballs on giant screens ... Each one I pass is a person, held here by decree, by a boulder placed across the mouth. If I walk through a temple built by slaves, sending a pittance home to countries too poor for anyone to bother waging war over ... then, who am I?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    UN human rights declaration turns 70

    • Frank Brennan
    • 10 December 2018
    14 Comments

    It is appropriate to affirm the worldwide amplification system for the 'still, small voice' of conscience speaking to power, even when that voice of conscience maintains a religious tone, while the power of the state is increasingly secular and the tone of society more stridently secularist.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Not even with time travel

    • Earl Livings
    • 03 December 2018
    3 Comments

    You never will know all ... You'd have to be everywhere at once, be behind and in every word and act, flow with the charged breath of mote and light. To sum up: You'd have to be God. Poor Thing. For the one fact denied God is the unforeseen.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Seamus Heaney's poetry workshop

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 08 August 2017
    2 Comments

    I found years on that my Birth Certificate And Christening Documents spelt out a nominal fate Of which I was totally unaware, Dragging in English, Irish, German lines of past blood, Like good stock, Corriedales and merinos of good fleece.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A Human Rights Day tribute to the Northern Territory's Tony Fitzgerald

    • Frank Brennan
    • 10 December 2015

    I first met this Tony on my regular visits here to Darwin when he was working at the North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service and then when he set up the mediation services under the auspices of Anglicare. In later years I knew him when he was your Anti-Discrimination Commissioner. He was a quiet, considered, gentle, strong and principled man. On Human Rights Day, it is only fitting that I honour Tony by offering some reflections on the architecture for human rights in Australia, on the contemporary human rights controversies, and on the way forward for better protection of the human rights of Aborigines and asylum seekers, two marginalised groups who had a special claim on Tony's sympathies.

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  • Ambassador of conscience

    • Sean McManus
    • 25 June 2015
    4 Comments

    As much as any other religious figure in Australia, Frank Brennan has maintained a religious perspective while engaging in issues of ethics and justice in contemporary Australia. His book Amplifying that Still Small Voice emphasises the importance of the 'religious sense that the human person is created in the image and likeness of God', while speaking in the language and terms that are understandable to the public square.

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  • Meddling priest's witness to the primacy of conscience

    • Paul Bongiorno
    • 09 June 2015
    9 Comments

    'In discussing Australia's asylum seeker policies Frank laments the government's deaf ear to calls from the churches, his own included, for a greater measure of compassion and a better way of dealing with the issue of boat people. Frank wryly comments: 'If only the Abbott Government with its disproportionate number of Jesuit alumni cabinet ministers could listen.' Paul Bongiorno launches Fr Frank Brennan SJ's book Amplifying That Still, Small Voice at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Canberra, 8 June 2015.

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