It’s a pity Alfred O’Rahilly is not alive today to debate the topic of science and religion with Professor David McConnell of Trinity College Dublin. O’Rahilly was himself a scientist. He was President of UCC. He spoke and wrote widely on the topic of science and religion. He died in 1969. McConnell had an article...
A terrible example of an IVF mix-up emerged last week. Two babies were mistakenly implanted in the wrong woman causing huge upset to the parents involved. What the case illustrates is how important the natural ties are to most people, even though our culture is currently deeply conflicted about the matter with its contradictory messages...
By Melanie McDonagh Just in time for the publication of The Mirror and the Light, the third and final volume of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell later this year, my old friend Richard Rex, a history professor at Cambridge, has delivered a lecture in Dublin on the first volume, Wolf Hall. It should...
Leo Varadkar and other Government members met with representatives of no fewer than 28 religious and non-religious organisations at Dublin Castle yesterday. The Government in one of its own press releases described the meeting as ‘Church State dialogue’, but gave the same amount of space and representation at the event to the Catholic Church, huge...
Professor Richard Rex of Queen’s College, Cambridge, addressed a packed University Church in Dublin last week on the topic: The Two Thomases, namely Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. In particular, he examined the portrayal of both in Hilary Mantel’s best-selling and widely-praised novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Professor Rex, who lectures in Reformation and Tudor...
The impression is often given that there is something very and unusual, not to mention undemocratic, about religious schools receiving public funds. In fact, it is absolutely normal. What is unusual is faith schools receiving no public funds. What is more, the Irish education system is one of the freest in the world, that is,...
Jordan Peterson recently interviewed Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire in the United States. Bishop Barron has built up a big online following as a defender of the reasonableness of the Catholic faith. Peterson is basically a defender of the Western moral tradition. There is obviously a big overlap between this tradition and Catholicism,...
We are well familiar with the hard cases our strict pro-life law produced, the X-case for example. They were massively publicised. Our new abortion law has already produced its own hard case, that of the baby who was aborted at Holles Street after being mistakenly diagnosed to have a ‘fatal foetal abnormality’. This has caused...
You might think that atheists and agnostics do not believe in the supernatural but you would be mistaken. Many believe in phenomena such as reincarnation, astrology and karma and many more continue to believe in objective good and evil, and that the universe has meaning and purpose. In other words, a minority are thorough-going naturalists....
When 17 year old Noa Pothoven died recently in the Netherlands following a long period of mental illness, it was initially and erroneously reported that she died by lethal injection under her country’s euthanasia law. In fact, she was allowed to refuse food and hydration. This is almost as disturbing and still shows a growing...
