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Keywords: Peter Steele

  • AUSTRALIA

    Back-pedalling on Vatican II

    • Michael Kelly
    • 08 October 2012
    30 Comments

    The fresh wind of Vatican II has been reined in, with the focus turned to shoring up 'the firm wall of religion' against threatening forces from a world that had grown tired of the Church. As Christianity faces minority status in Europe, the Pope offers an intellectualised version of the ghetto mentality that Vatican II sought to break down.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Chivalrous knight

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 July 2012
    1 Comment

    I have always associated Peter with words like chivalrous, knightly, courtly and courteous. He was courteous and elegant in conversation, listening intently to even the most inarticulate of people. But knights’ business is to fight. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The eloquence of God

    • Brendan Byrne
    • 04 July 2012
    2 Comments

    'And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we saw his glory, full of grace and truth' (John 1:1, 14). In the second-last conversation I had with Peter, we agreed that that text should be the Gospel for his Requiem. There is a sense, I’m sure, in which every poem that Peter wrote was an instance of the Word becoming flesh.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Interviewing Peter Steele for America Magazine

    • Jim McDermott
    • 04 July 2012

    About four years ago I had the great pleasure to spend four days with Peter Steele while he was at Georgetown. Hearing that he had died, I went back to those interviews, hours and hours we spent on things like the first time he read Billy Collins, growing up in Perth, unexpected blessings, and the never-ending catalogue of characters and words that fascinated and delighted him. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele reads his poetry at Georgetown

    • Jim McDermott
    • 04 July 2012
    1 Comment

    While interviewing Peter in his office at Georgetown University in Washington in 2009, Jim McDermott SJ made audio recordings of Peter reading a selection of his poems.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To exhilarate their minds

    • Peter Steele
    • 03 July 2012
    5 Comments

    Here's the mint still on my hands. A wreath, so Pliny thought was 'good for students, to exhilarate their minds'. Late in the course, I’ll settle for a sprig or two.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's seven types of ingenuity

    • Philip Harvey
    • 03 July 2012
    7 Comments

    More than once I observed him walking from the Medley Building of the University of Melbourne to Newman College reading a book, not looking up. It was the book leading the human through the everyday world. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's path to something better

    • Michael Kelly
    • 02 July 2012
    10 Comments

    However sunny the greeting, beneath the exterior there lurked in Peter Steele an acute familiarity with the dark side. Nicknamed 'Stainless' early in life, the swashbuckling gait and swaggering style masked all that he knew and felt of life’s grimier parts.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The beauty that was Peter Steele's mind

    • Morag Fraser
    • 29 June 2012
    24 Comments

    Peter Steele SJ – priest, poet, teacher, essayist, homilist, and friend – died on Wednesday 27 June 2012. During Eureka Street’s first months, in 1991, he gave its editor some riding instructions. Media magnate was not his style. ‘Publish the very best writing you can lay your hands on’, he said. That was it. But it was more than enough.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's hymns in sickness

    • Andrew Bullen
    • 14 June 2012
    8 Comments

    'Monday is Day Oncology, where the dark burses arrive by courier, and we're glad to see them stripped for action, hooked in the air, lucent against fear.' Maybe only Steele could see these bags of chemo as Christological signs. As with the zoo once, so now the oncology ward offers hints of that other eden.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Bringing poetry back to politics

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 04 November 2011
    5 Comments

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Bringing poetry back to politics

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 04 November 2011

    'The failure of the Rudd and Gillard administrations', said Paul Keating last week, 'is the lack of an over-arching story.' Eureka Street poetry editor Philip Harvey believes poets have a role in articulating a sense of meaning and direction that is lacking in politics and the media.

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