In his column in this week’s Irish Independent, David Quinn asks why we don’t seem to care about the murder and persecution of Christians in many parts of the world today, including Iraq. He wonders if we refuse to give victim status to Christians even where they are very definitely oppressed minorities because of the...
What do people mean what they speak about the separation of Church and State? Having read Hugh Linehan’s opinion piece in The Irish Times yesterday it wasn’t clear to me. Linehan was responding to the homily Archbishop Michael Neary delivered at the top of Croagh Patrick last Sunday, Reek Sunday. Archbishop Neary made the comment...
Ireland appeared before the UN Human Rights Committee and that Committee has now issued a report about Ireland that reads like a politically correct charge sheet. David Quinn writes about the biased nature of these proceedings in this article in The Irish Catholic and draws attention to Ireland’s excessively deferential attitude towards these UN committees.
When I read in the papers about a man who won a payout of €70,000 after being sacked from his job with South Tipperary County Council for repeatedly talking about his religion during working hours, I have to confess that my sympathies were initially with the Council. But when I read the full account of...
Voltaire once said “if you wish to converse with me, define your terms”, and I think the debate over employment law governing the hiring of LGBT people, single parents, those in cohabiting relationships, and those who are divorced and remarried in organisations with a religious ethos is in bad need of some term-defining. President Barack...
Lord Falconer’s “Assisted Dying” bill is currently being debated in the House of Lords. The bill would legalise assisted suicide by doctors in the UK, and would seriously undermine the principle of “do no harm” as well as the protections that UK law currently gives the terminally ill. It’s very bad news. But the prospect...
It seems that no sooner was Ireland declared the country that does most good for the world (according to the first “Good Country Index”, or GCI), than our human rights record was being lambasted by the UN, and newspaper columnists here were calling us a “misogynist state” and a place where “The Irish Constitution treats...
“What has happened to consistent, coherent atheism?” is the question being asked by Michael Robbins, who’s reviewing Nick Spencer’s book Atheism: The Origin of the Species for Slate. Spencer’s book examines what he calls the ‘creation myth’ of the orgin of modern atheism, different versions of which are embraced by most of the ‘New Atheists’...
“What has happened to consistent, coherent atheism?” is the question being asked by Michael Robbins, who’s reviewing Nick Spencer’s book Atheism: The Origin of the Species for Slate. Spencer’s book examines what he calls the ‘creation myth’ of the orgin of modern atheism, different versions of which are embraced by most of the ‘New Atheists’...
As we’re greeted today by the news that a Christian bakery in Northern Ireland faces legal action over refusing to bake a cake with a slogan in support of gay marriage, this week’s New York Times column by Ross Douthat is hugely relevant. What I like about Douthat is that e’s almost never content to...
