The View Every so often, I come across a book that I feel is worth sharing with readers, and Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Drs John and Julie Gottman is one such. The book concerns how to deepen relationships through a series of dates planned to facilitate in-depth conversations.…
Chai Brady and Colm Fitzpatrick Regular church attendance leads to better mental health because religion gives people “hope, meaning and perspective”, according to one of the country’s leading psychiatrists. Prof. Patricia Casey was reacting to a major new Irish study which looks at people aged 50 or older and finds that those who attend…
The world might be all about social media, but a good social network is worth considering, writes David Quinn Critics dismiss religion as pie in the sky at best, and an actively harmful, regressive force at worst. That is, they believe religion is a form of escapism, or else it unleashes fanaticism and violence…
Pope Francis joined Catholic Church leaders expressing sorrow after back-to-back mass shootings in the US left at least 31 dead and dozens injured in Texas and Ohio last weekend. After the Angelus in St Peter’s Square on August 4, the Pope said he wanted to convey his spiritual closeness to the victims, the wounded and…
It seems odd that we are asked to pay a fee for a service that many of us don’t use, writes John McGuirk I am childless, but my taxes pay for schools. I am not sick, thank God, but my taxes pay for hospitals. Ireland is not likely to be invaded any time soon, but…
With almost a dozen Dominican sisters leaving the Muckross Park convent in Dublin this week the local parish administrator has said it is a “loss to the community”. Multitudes of tributes have been paid to the sisters after the main convent building in Donnybrook closed in a decision made last year on foot of a…
The president of the Polish bishops’ conference condemned attacks on clergy and places of worship in the traditionally Catholic country as the Church countered media accusations of inciting violence against LGBTQ groups. Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan said that “ever more frequent attacks of hatred against believing people and priests” were a growing concern for…
An Irish academic’s call for children to be taught the ‘positive’ aspects of porn has been described as “inherently exploitative”. Writing on the RTÉ.ie website, porn researcher Kate Dawson said, “there is a real need for youth to be equipped with information about pornography and be supported in developing skills necessary to critique sexual representations…
Among the pilgrims on Croagh Patrick last month was a Belgian who’d walked three months to get there, writes Greg Daly Santiago de Compostela is a fashionable destination for Irish pilgrims year-in-year-out nowadays, with a record 7,548 Irish pilgrims collecting their ‘Compostela’ from the cathedral offices last year. In the Camino’s medieval heyday, however,…
Questions of Faith Many Christians today – usually fundamentalists or those of the evangelical tradition – believe that God created the world in six days, in accordance with the Genesis account described in the Bible. This well-known passage outlines a six-day schema of creation, concluding on the seventh day that God rested. “By the seventh…
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
Chai Brady
Greg Daly
Colm Fitzpatrick