Judging by the end-times rhetoric employed by some journalists, bloggers and Twitterati in response to the US Supreme Court’s decision on Hobby Lobby, one might be forgiven for thinking that contraception had been banned nationwide, fundamentalist corporation owners authorised to micromanage their employees’ sex lives, and women declared second-class citizens. A rather popular image doing...
Can the ‘working poor’ afford to maintain a family? Does being a member of the working poor make a person more likely to divorce? Does it make them less likely to marry in the first place? The answers are ‘no’, yes’ and ‘yes’ respectively. What is to be done? There is no easy answer, but...
“The Meaning of Religious Freedom” Speaking Notes of Bishop Brendan Leahy Strand Hotel, Limerick, June 17th, 2014 Hosted by The Iona Institute and The Irish Catholic I am grateful to the Iona Institute and The Irish Catholic newspaper for their invitation to offer a reflection on “The Meaning of Religious Freedom”. Though the suggested title...
Peter Ferguson, who calls himself ‘Humanisticus’, has replied once again on polygamy and same-sex marriage, and asked the Iona Institute a few questions. I’ll do my best to answer them here, and I think it might be wise to leave our blogathon at that. In truth, these points have been dealt with in numerous previous...
Many atheists do not believe in free will. They don’t believe in free will because they believe we, and our thoughts, are the products of matter and energy and nothing else and therefore we are basically ‘meat machines’ or ‘moist robots’ and therefore no more have free will than a robot, or a dog. This...
The bad news keeps rolling in as the ever-predictable Ratchet Effect guides social policy. Supposedly only available in cases of extreme suffering, Belgium saw euthanasia figures rise by 27% in the last year. Still, one cannot deny that a worthy human trait is the reluctance to see others suffer. In Man’sSearch for Meaning, the late...
Almost 800 young children and babies died at Tuam mother and child home between 1925 and 1961. Two things were to blame, the very high child mortality rate at the time, and the social and religious attitudes then prevalent. In his column in The Irish Independent today, David Quinn writes about the latest institutional scandal to...
The NHS is to give children as young as nine years of age drugs in preparation for ‘gender reassignment’. As the Mail on Sunday reported, a treatment using hypothalamic blockers, “which halt[s] the onset of adulthood, is aimed at youngsters who believe they are trapped in the wrong body.” Monthly injections suppress the production of...
There are few types of survey in this world more reliable than those carried out by insurance companies. When your company’s continued existence depends upon the quality of your information, you tend to make very sure that your data is solid. So Allianz Insurance’s “LoveFamilyMoney” study on the impact of family structure on financial wellbeing...
I must have missed the reports on the protests and vigils outside the Sudanese embassy, after a pregnant Sudanese doctor was sentenced to death for the crime of apostasy. Perhaps they were all busily protesting the Nigerian embassy, calling for greater protection of that nation’s Christians, following the Boko Haram kidnappings. But I’m sure the...
