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...
One of the things the Iona Institute does most is… fight. We put forward ideas in the public square, and if those ideas weren’t at least somewhat controversial or disputed there wouldn’t be a need for us to exist. But we only hope to start conversations – what people think about religious education, or marriage...
There’s a new report out from the Institute for American Values and the Center of the American Experiment, which examines some of the ways that men and women’s brains and bodies change when they become parents. While the physical changes that happen in women during and after pregnancy are well known, Mother Bodies, Father Bodies,...
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...
