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Keywords: Brian Doyle

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My morning with Frank Brennan

    • Brian Doyle
    • 22 June 2011
    12 Comments

    Fell into riveting conversation recently. We talked about Australia's and Oregon's history with assisted suicide, the plight of Indigenous Australians, and his views on the personal and public profiles of Cardinal George Pell. Here's how it happened.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Osama bin Laden's wasted life

    • Brian Doyle
    • 17 May 2011
    25 Comments

    Imagine the same man, rather than consumed by hate, alert instead to humour, to the power of mercy, apology, simplicity, conversation, common ground. Imagine what he might have done for the religion he loved, to which he instead did more damage than anyone else in history.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mothers, soldiers and other entrepreneurs

    • Brian Doyle
    • 04 May 2011
    3 Comments

    To attempt, to begin, is really to dream, to envision, to speculate, and then to work like a burro to implement, to create, to make real. How is it that a word like entrepreneurship, which means vast and amazing things, has become so commonplace and thin?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tommy's twin brother Jesus

    • Brian Doyle
    • 18 April 2011
    2 Comments

    Not one soul on that Easter morning long ago cared a whit about theological matters. They did not even care if the thin man once died and rose again. They were there for each other, out of respect and affection, and habit and custom, and because they wanted to give their children a thing they couldn't explain.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Kids circle the holy parts

    • Brian Doyle
    • 17 March 2011
    2 Comments

    They learn to lie, are just not into dental hygiene, skin their knees nine times a day, and do things like smear peanut butter on their abraded knees and shake flour on the dog. Still, best of all, better than every other joy and thrill, are kids.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mass story

    • Brian Doyle
    • 02 March 2011
    19 Comments

    Not until yesterday had I enjoyed a Mass during which I heard reggae music, washing machines, and an argument about basketball. What could be more beautifully human and holy than sitting over food and telling stories and insisting on miracles, in the company of a child and a dog?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Saints and cats

    • Various cat poets
    • 22 February 2011
    4 Comments

    I didn't have much hope. Soon I would be 50. Love was fitful and glorious and painful. There will always be thugs in caves murdering children and crowing. But we are capable of creating wonders beyond our imagination every second of the game.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Australia through American eyes

    • Brian Doyle
    • 18 January 2011
    15 Comments

    Do Australians hate Americans? No, because Americans invented basketball. What do Australians eat? Yeast paste. It tastes like someone ground up a penguin and then left it in the rain for a month before adding rubber and dirt to it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best Of 2010: The thirty good priests

    • Brian Doyle
    • 04 January 2011
    2 Comments

    For every greedy evil rapacious liar priest .. there are thirty great and subtle men .. Who wake alone quite early and don their vocations .. Willingly like a thorny endlessly tumultuous prayer

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Two nuns and my second confession

    • Brian Doyle
    • 30 November 2010
    2 Comments

    Consider the nun we had for first grade ... Sister Dorita, who had a stevedore's forearms. On the second day of school she hauled a bubbling boy named David into the air by his necktie.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Football hero's homeless grace

    • Brian Doyle
    • 10 November 2010
    6 Comments

    Former local sports hero The Hawk took up residence on the town football field. A reporter came looking for a tale of woe but didn't find it. People leave him sandwiches, the kids who play lacrosse set up a screen so his tent won't get peppered by stray shots, and cops drift by to make sure no one's giving him grief.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Defying the ebook revolution

    • Brian Doyle
    • 28 July 2010
    5 Comments

    Went to return a book the other day and it refused to go in the BOOKS ONLY slot. I tried again, thinking perhaps I had suddenly aged beyond belief and could not muster the muscle to cram it through the wall, but no, it was the book itself, adamant, recalcitrant, bristling and ruffling indignantly, that would not allow itself to be returned.

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