Escaping the Bunker: Democracy Needs Christianity By Mark Hamilton. So What Imprint, Dublin, 2021. The world before Christ was a savage place. Ancient civilisations were cruel and unforgiving. In this world, despite the benign and wise voices of people like Akhenaten, Zoroaster, Socrates, Cicero and others, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome placed very little value […]
The interplay of trauma, existential insecurity, and general woe, and the story of mankind’s belief in another life, in God or in gods, seems to persist throughout the ages. We have the Great Flood accounts in both Gilgamesh and in The Bible — given in one as a story of man’s correction by his gods, […]
It was a eerie sight. The lone figure of the Vicar of Christ on earth standing under a canopy in the rain-drenched esplanade of St. Peter’s Basillica in Rome addressing the world, Urbi et orbi.
Parsing a non-story in Saturday’s Irish Independent tells us a sad and genuine story about the state of the conscience of our nation. But it needs parsing. The paper reported on what was essentially a non-issue – they as good as said so, but still had to give us about 700 words – about the […]
“History is written by the winners” is a trite adage which was probably first circulated by some losers. Ever since, it has been used to cast a shadow of doubt over every account of struggles between human beings of which history purports to tell us. Searching through our past is a sacred pursuit. It is […]
In the wave of disgust, horror and revulsion which has cascaded over us with the revelations of the barbaric treatment of Kevin Lunney (earlier this month), angry questions come spontaneously into our mind. Among those are questions about the very humanity of the perpetrators. We also ask what kind of punishment is appropriate for those […]
The world seems to be irreconcilably divided into two diametrically opposed realms of feeling and fear. These worlds do not talk to each other, they talk at each other. There is the realm of those who feel The Shame And Peril Of Living In A No-Abortion State and those who in equal measure feel The Shame And Peril […]
You might say, paraphrasing Dickens, it is the best of times and it is the worst of times. Freedom of expression, the freedom to speak your mind and let your voice be heard is one of the great goods in the firmament of good things available to the human race. We have never had greater potential […]
There is careless and sloppy journalism and there is cold calculated malicious journalism. Sadly both fit into the spectrum to which Janet Malcolm notoriously drew attention in a New Yorker essay thirty years ago when she wrote: ”Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what […]