Irish Catholic actor Liam Neeson tells Cindy Pearlman about life after the death of his wife ‘I love that expression, ‘How do you make God laugh?’,” Liam Neeson says. ”The answer: ‘You just tell him your plans and then watch as fate takes you in a different direction.’ You think your life is…
A euthanasia group was behind Britain’s commission on assisted suicide, writes Greg Daly A.S. Byatt caused a stir some years back when she publicly disparaged the phenomenal success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, describing them as little more than a comfortable patchwork of clichés, unworthy of comparison with the writings of such fantasists…
A gay reader shares some uncomfortable questions aroundthe Church and a gay lifestyle. As a practising gay Catholic (practising both my faith and my sexual orientation) one gets used, not entirely comfortably, to coping with ambiguity. The Catholic Church could never be described as a welcoming place for gay Catholics; this is despite…
Dr Andrea Fitzgerald Ireland has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in Europe, with approximately 50 per cent of women breastfeeding when they leave hospital, compared to, for example, 99pc in Norway and 84pc in Britain. On the whole, Irish mums also stop breastfeeding far earlier than their European counterparts. Research is yet to…
In any chemist or health food section you will find a phenomenal array of vitamin and dietary supplements. Many of these can be quite expensive. So, are they of any real benefit? Since Victorian times, there has always been a ready market for ‘cure alls’. Research has shown that many of these dietary supplements are…
Keeping a healthy,balanced diet is actually fairly simple, writes Rory Fitzgerald We are what we eat. That can be a curse or a blessing — depending on what you eat. The greatest health problem facing us in Ireland today is not the lack of food, but a surfeit of it. In a race…
Minister of State, Roisin Shortall, suggested recently that parents who allow their teenage children to drink at home may be contributing to substance abuse among young people. In an interview with Conor Pope of The Irish Times, the minister said that while parents might be well meaning in their attempts to encourage a positive…
Emmet Dooley tells Mags Gargan about his decision to abstain from sex before marriage Chastity is a word that has been reintroduced to a whole new generation thanks to the Twilight series of books and films, where a central part of the plot revolves around the fact that the main characters Bella and…
”When grace enters, there is no choice — humans must dance.” W.H. Auden wrote those words and, beautiful as they sound, I wish they were true. When grace enters a room we should begin to dance but, sadly, more often than not we let some little thing, some minor mosquito bite, blind us to…
Paddy Monaghan describes how theAlpha course is growing in Ireland Pope Benedict XVI, announcing the forthcoming Synod on New Evangelisation, stated that ”the Church exists to evangelise”. But how do we evangelise? The Alpha course is certainly one way. It is a 10-week course on the basic truths of Christianity. It brings people…
Rory Fitzgerald
Maria Byrne
Mags Gargan
Fr Ronald Rolheiser