The Department of Education have launched a consultation process to ascertain the views of parents as to how Catholic schools, when they are the only one in a given area, should become more ‘inclusive’ towards children from other religions and none. A leaflet will be sent to parents and it draws on the recommendations, published...
The new Growing Up in Ireland study, published yesterday, acknowledges the importance of family structure and cites research that saying having two parent is generally better than one. Given the huge reluctance on the part of ‘official Ireland’ to ever own up to this research, this has to count as something of a breakthrough. The...
Australia recently recently threw the Labour party out of office after six years in government. One of the major planks of Labour’s election campaign was a promise by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to legalise same-sex marriage. It got him precisely nowhere. According to the blog, Mercatornet, “[Rudd] pushed it all the way to election eve...
What happens when you marry outside your belief system, whether that be a religious belief system or a secular belief system? The answer, frequently, is trouble as ‘Til Faith Do Us Part’, a new book by Naomi Schaefer Riley from Oxford University Press makes clear....
Last week, the Iona Institute released a report detailing the extent of marital breakdown and the proliferation of new family forms in Ireland, including a surge in the number of children raised by lone parents. Iona Institute representatives debated this issue on a number of programmes and came up against a flat-out denial that there...
Gay couple David Tutera and Ryan Jurica have gone their separate way just months after taking delivery of half-twins via a surrogate mother. Tutera is biologically the father of one child and Jurica is father of the other child. Advocates of sperm and egg donation and surrogate motherhood constantly tell us that the biological tie...
The British Social Attitudes survey, which has been running annually for 30 years now, was published yesterday and showed that, over the course of those 30 years, there has been a steep decline in the numbers who think marriage is important for raising children and those who identify as religious. The numbers aren’t really surprising....
This week The Iona Institute launched a new report called Marriage Breakdown and Family Structure in Ireland. The headline figure is that divorce and separation in Ireland has risen sixfold since 1968. As at Census 2011, almost 250,000 Irish adults were separated or divorced. I appeared on a number of shows to discuss the report...
The trend towards removing every last trace of religion from the public square continues apace across the Western world. In a blog for the Telegraph website, Brendan O’Neill (pictured) says that the hallmark of this trend is secular liberal intolerance. O’Neill, himself an atheist, writes: “If you want to see what intolerance means, look no...
This week the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ageless ‘I have a dream’ speech took place. Much of the commentary has ignored the fact that Dr King was a Baptist pastor that his vision, and his vision of justice specifically, had a deeply religious underpinning. As David Quinn argues in his column in The...
