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Keywords: Eulogy

  • RELIGION

    New horizons for justice and solidarity

    • Frank Brennan
    • 10 September 2018

    As leaders like Gough Whitlam and Patrick Dodson have attested, if we are to imagine and strive towards New Horizons for Justice and Solidarity, we need conviction, perseverance, capacity for compromise, relationships of trust, humour.

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  • RELIGION

    Leading in diverse times

    • Frank Brennan
    • 16 July 2018
    3 Comments

    'Kristina Keneally was unapologetic in putting the place of women in our church front and centre. And so we should.' Tropical and Topical, 2018 National Catholic Principals' Conference, Cairns Convention Centre, 16 July 2018.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Public servant to the First Australians

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 April 2018
    2 Comments

    'Nothing gave Barrie greater pleasure than to see Aboriginal Australians replacing him and taking their rightful place in the administration of the nation.' Funeral Homily for Barrie Dexter CBE, Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, 26 April 2018

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  • RELIGION

    Citizenship and the Common Good

    • Frank Brennan
    • 30 August 2017
    6 Comments

    'There was one controversy in which Lionel Bowen was involved that does provide good lessons for the contemporary Catholic considering the desirable law or social policy on a contested issue - lessons for the citizen weighing what is for the common good. Back in 1979 there was debate in the Parliament on a motion which was framed to stop Medicare funding of abortions. Bowen, a strict Catholic, was strongly opposed to the motion. He did not think the motion was about abortion. He thought it was about money.' Frank Brennan's 2017 Lionel Bowen Lecture

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Contours and prospects for Indigenous recognition in the Australian constitution

    • Frank Brennan
    • 16 October 2015
    2 Comments

    I acknowledge those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who insist that they have never ceded their sovereignty to the rest of us. I join with those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who hope for better days when they are recognised in the Australian Constitution. As an advocate for modest constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians, I respect those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who question the utility of such recognition. But I do take heart from President Obama's line in his Charleston eulogy for the late Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney: 'Justice grows out of recognition'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Constitutional change that will improve indigenous quality of life

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 July 2015
    6 Comments

    Those Aborigines who are most at home in modern Australia tend to be those with a secure foothold in both the Dreaming and the Market. Those who are most alienated and despairing are those with a foothold in neither. Constitutional change alone won't make things better. But a good Constitution is a better complement to other measures – such as a statutory charter – than a bad one.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Artefacts of grace

    • Rory Harris
    • 30 June 2015
    5 Comments

    The fabric over your bed, a life of quilts made simple & held up ... of more than ninety years, taught generation to generation.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What my father gave me

    • Lerys Byrnes | Flora Smith
    • 12 May 2015
    1 Comment

    My father and I worked quietly together. We would take on the load, touch up the mask, saying too little to each other... His photograph hangs in my study now, watching me write, sharing the silence.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Memories of Gough

    • Frank Brennan
    • 22 October 2014
    44 Comments

    What he did for me, he did for countless other Australians who dreamt of a better world and a nobler Australia. Even his political opponents are forever in his debt for having elevated the national vision and for having given us a more complete and generous image of ourselves. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Standing on Mandela's shoulders

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 12 December 2013
    6 Comments

    People respond well to heroes, especially those people who have had their rights subjugated by others. But Obama, with his swagger and rhetoric, was basking in the reflected glow of Mandela's hard-won glory. His address fulfilled the collective expectation that the almost-saint Mandela be eulogised by a man of comparable stature, but it also afforded him a global platform on which to polish his own ego, to reinforce his importance on the world stage. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Notes against a closed-fist mind

    • Peter Bakowski
    • 15 October 2013
    2 Comments

    Time is lost more often than it's found. Be wary of having too many intentions. Make the rut you're in as uncomfortable as possible. Don't dwell in dark places unless it's to gain empathy for those who dwell in dark places. No one is born with a conscience. If pigs could fly, there'd be less bacon.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A life of oranges

    • Rory Harris
    • 24 September 2013
    6 Comments

    My father is still in the house he built with his wife; those hand-held walks after work from three suburbs away, to plant a garden as the bricks became walls, and as the fruit trees budded walls became rooms.

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