A poll published in The Sunday Times last week shows how rapidly Ireland has changed on a raft of moral questions. The exact degree of change is open to debate because different polling questions get different answers, but there has undoubtedly been a big shift in a lot of moral attitudes. The poll finds that...
Terry Mattingly at GetReligion writes about the way in which the media is missing the truly vast scale of the religious persecution currently taking place in the Middle East. Several times a year, a major national or international story simply takes over the news. The bigger the story, the more likely — in my experience...
Over at The Public Discourse, Mark Regnerus reports some of the findings from a forthcoming study, Relationships in America. Regernus was interested in finding out what Christians who support same-sex marriage believed about other issues of sexual morality – and what makes his study interesting is that he measured the attitudes of churchgoing Christians, rather...
One of the myths about marriage most badly in need of busting is the idea that cohabiting before marriage makes you less likely to divorce – a sort of “try before you buy” effect. This sounds quite sensible on the face of it. Then you look at the evidence and realise that the reality is...
Does a child simply need loving parents (or just one loving parent) or is it a good thing to have a father as well as a mother? What seems to be particularly in doubt in certain circles these days is the need for a father. Well, some of us do indeed argue that every child...
The case of Gammy, a baby born through surrogacy who was abandoned by his genetic parents after they discovered he had Down Syndrome, (and is now being raised by his surrogate (birth) mother, a Thai woman named Pattaramon Chanbua) is uniquely tragic. The apparent callousness of the parents taking Gammy’s twin sister but not him,...
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...
