One of the aims of The Iona Institute is to highlight, and to do what we can to counter the rise of aggressive secularism and the consequent and growing threat to freedom of religion and conscience. Since our launch in January 2007 we have continually drawn attention to what is happening in this regard both...
Here are a few more thoughts on that sex, sin and society poll in The Irish Times. Yesterday the paper ran part two of the poll and one question asked respondents to rank in order of personal disapproval eleven types of behaviour that all the major religions regard as sinful. Number one was ‘lying under...
Yesterday The Irish Times published the results of a poll that show we are becoming ever more liberal in our attitudes towards sex and relationships. The results, which aren’t a bit surprising, will be greeted with much self-adulation by liberals because they mean we are becoming more tolerant. This is true. A society that places...
Last week Marriage Equality, an organisation campaigning for same-sex marriage, published a report to considerable fanfare that deals with the experiences of children raised by same-sex couples. What was actually even more interesting than the report itself was who funded it and who turned up at the launch. It was funded by the Dutch government...
We hear a lot about the pay gap between men and women. This is allegedly the result of sexism against women although it is really the result of the different choices men and women make about their work and home balance. Women tend to choose home over work if forced and that will obviously affect...
Dr Brad Wilcox of Virginia University, (he spoke at an Iona Institute event last year), and Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin have a thought provoking column in the Wall Street Journal. The column draws attention to the widening marriage and religion gap between the American working and middle classes and the hugely harmful effect of...
The latest unemployment figures confirm once again that two-thirds of the 450,000 people who are without a job in this country are men. The same phenomenon has been found in other countries. Basically, the recession has disproportionately hit construction and manufacturing, traditional male industries. This is why some commentators have called the recession a ‘mancession’....
A story in the British press over the weekend relates how a couple were refused permission to adopt a black or Asian child because they are both white. The local authority in question objects to inter-racial adoption. The authority obviously believes that the race of a couple is a relevant factor in deciding which couples...
Box office figures from the US suggest that Jennifer Anistion’s latest comedy, The Switch, which is about a forty- year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated has flopped, at least in its first week. According to this First Things blog, it took in only only $8.4 million on opening...
New numbers from the UK suggest that their teen pregnancy rate, already the highest in the EU, is on the rise again among under 16s after some years of remaining steady. This is despite the Labour Government spending 13 years and hundreds of millions of pounds in concerted effort to halve pregnancies among under-18s by...
