An article in the prestigious journal, ‘Foreign Affairs’, reckons religion is in decline in much of the world, and not just in rich countries, and this is no bad thing because it is not resulting in increased crime and corruption as some religious leaders would have predicted. But this is misleading, for reasons to be...
The debate about assisted suicide is heating up in Ireland again with a Private Member’s Bill due to come before the Dail that seeks to permit the procedure under certain circumstances. At the core of this debate is the very dangerous assumption that death by a form of suicide is compatible with human dignity. Dignity...
By Jim Stack MSc PhD Two years ago, I wrote an Iona blog comparing historical abortion ratios in Ireland and Portugal. My main purpose at the time was to predict what would happen to abortion numbers in Ireland following repeal of the Eighth Amendment, based on Portuguese experience before and after they legalised abortion in...
Phil Hogan, our Commissioner in Brussels, is in big trouble because he violated some of the public health guidelines designed to protect us from Covid-19. He is under huge pressure to resign. That decision is up to his boss, EU Commission president, Ursula Van Der Leyen. Or is it? In fact, is ‘Big Phil’ responsible...
A lot of atheists don’t seem to understand properly the consequences of their atheism. They think you can ditch belief in God and retain belief in objective right and wrong, free will and even some form of meaning and purpose. The book for these naïve atheists to read is ‘The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying...
The vast majority of pro-abortion doctors working in neo-natal units in Flanders, Belgium, support being allowed to kill a newborn baby if it has a serious disability. This can only be described as a further descent into barbarism as the culture of death strengthens its grip in that country. A new survey of 117 physicians...
Is the value Christians attach to life impeding our response to Covid-19? This is basically the question columnist Matthew Parris asked in The Times of London last Saturday. He believes that we have given too much importance to saving every individual life we possibly can from the the pandemic and so our response to it...
A new study claims that more restrictive abortion laws do not reduce the incidence of abortion. In fact, the opposite may be the case, it says. If true, this would be a big blow to the pro-life movement which obviously fights for more restrictive laws. But a closer look at the study shows no such...
‘Mrs America’ is a much discussed new series depicting the battle that raged in the United States in the 1970s over a proposed amendment to the US Constitution called the ‘Equal Rights Amendment’. This proposed to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex. The ‘Mrs America’ of the series is the real-life Phyllis Schlafly (played...
A commitment to establish a Citizens’ Assembly on education was a core feature of the recent general election manifesto of the Green Party. Among other things, what are the implications of this for faith schools? We saw where this went with abortion. But first, a look at the origin of the idea. This proposal was...
