A few days ago, Dr Michael Ryan of WHO singled out Sweden for praise for its handling of the covid19 crisis. This is significant because Sweden was being pilloried as arrogant at best, irresponsible at worst for its refusal to join most of rest of the world in state enforced lockdown. Sweden’s extensive testing regime […]
Both history and fiction fascinate us by showing simultaneously how much and how little the human condition changes over time. We no more live in the ‘real’ world than any generation that has gone before us. Like previous generations, we live within a capsule that is defined as much by what it ignores, cuts off, denies as […]
The phrase ‘missing Mass’ used to refer to non-attendance at Sunday Mass and was a serious omission for any Catholic. If it was habitual it could lead to a call from the local priest. Today that would be represented as clerical policing rather than an act of pastoral outreach. In fact, in a homogeneous religious […]
The book of Leviticus might seem to have little to offer by way of guidance to 21st century life. But there is one particular prohibition which might make us re-consider its relevance at this particular time. In Leviticus,Chapter 11, there is a long list of winged creatures that are described as ‘unclean and not to eat’ […]
People are thinking outside the box. We have time aplenty these days to think and to consider what we might like to take from ‘new normal’ when what we used to call normality resumes again. Some things about new normal feel more normal and more rational than old normal. Some things about old normal seem quite […]
It is said that in a war the first casualty is truth. The world is at war today in a unique way. There is not a corner of the globe that has resisted the onslaught of the lethal, microscopic,viral army. We should be united, co-operating and we should certainly suspend ‘business as usual’ when it comes […]
Since the western world re-set its priorities following the Covid-19 outbreak, one of the most noticeable consequences was that the measures taken to stem the disease’s advance had some really interesting, positive, unanticipated, collateral consequences for the environment. It might have seemed that the climate agenda had been shelved in the face of a more […]
Covid-19 looks likely to rank among the most startling black swan events of history. A black swan in economic parlance disturbs the existing paradigms, sails into sudden view out of seeming nowhere and shatters settled doctrines about white feathers, orange beaks and blacked up eyes. Who could have predicted? We were looking in the wrong […]
It used to be called being ‘sent to Coventry’. It meant social ostracization, being ignored and snubbed in company – a well established form of passive aggression which has taken multiple forms in today’s world. We know it as no-platforming, blocking, muting, unfriending or cancelling. Some forms are more exclusionary than others of course. If […]
The very first session of the newly convened Citizens Assembly to consider Gender Equality (February 15/16,2020) doesn’t leave any doubt about the point of the exercise. Previous assemblies were accused of manipulating participants in various ways to bring them to pre-determined conclusions. However, it would be hard to point at anything so blatantly biased as […]
It was perhaps inevitable that Leo would do a Hillary and lash out at the rump of ‘deplorables’ who are muddying the electoral waters for him.
Several stories in recent weeks have brought a new focus on what equality activists call ‘covert racism’. The opposite of overt racism. Meghan Markle was certainly subjected to overt, racial slurs on social media but according to some of her defenders it was the covert racism from mainline media and broadcasting that made life impossible […]