An overwhelming majority of Americans (83%) said they support conscience protection rights for health care professionals because they should not be forced to perform procedures against their moral beliefs. 91% of faith-based health care professionals said they need conscience protections and would rather stop practicing medicine altogether than be forced to violate their conscience. These…
Parents should be the first educators when it comes to sex, writes Colm Fitzpatrick Most people find broaching the topic of sex uncomfortable and for many parents this awkwardness is only heightened when discussing the subject with their children. ‘The Talk’ as it’s euphemistically phrased, denotes the time in your child’s life when you…
Irishman and former Archbishop of Pretoria in South Africa William Slattery has said the Irish Church should be more “forceful, more self-confident” in spreading the Good News, as it’s shifted away from “being close to people”. Returning home last month, Archbishop William (Liam) Slattery OFM said the Church is hugely important for community and has…
Since Brexit has dominated the UK news for the past three years, it might be easy to miss the great strides being made by the government in promoting religious freedom in the same time period. The latest move has been to appoint Rehman Chishti, a Conservative Member of Parliament, as the new Prime Minister’s Special…
Family members of an 80-year-old woman in England are advocating for legalised assisted suicide after the woman was found not guilty by a UK court in an apparent “mercy killing” of her husband. Mavis Eccleston, 80, was accused of killing her husband Dennis, 81, with a lethal dose of prescription medicine. Prosecutors claimed that Mavis…
Dining with the Durrells: Stories and Recipes from the Cookery Archives of Mrs Louise Durrell, by David Shimwell, foreword by Lee Durrell, afterword by Jacquie Durrell (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) My Family and other Animals was the late Gerald Durrell’s greatest success, an engaging mixture of an amusing family saga with an account of the…
Chai Brady speaks to an Irish missionary about the Church in South Africa, and what the Irish Church can learn from it After celebrating Mass in a church high in the South African mountains, an Irish missionary saw a man approaching him in a way that spelled danger; he had not seen him at the…
We quite naturally tend to think of the word ‘Christ’ as Jesus’ second name. We think of the name ‘Jesus Christ’ like we think of names like ‘Susan Parker’ or ‘Jack Smith’. But that’s an unhealthy confusion. Jesus didn’t have a second name. The word ‘Christ’ is a title which, while it includes the person…
For much of the past decade, my wife’s medical training has dragged our family around Ireland and Britain. We have moved house 11 times in 10 years, through Cork, Dublin, Surrey and the Isle of Wight. Thankfully, our nomadic existence is at last coming to an end, as we settle back into where we began,…
Mainly About Books By the books editor Among the many institutions that derive from the 1920s that still survive to this day the Folklore Department of University College Dublin is the most interesting, and perhaps the most culturally significant. Its productions, such as a recent work on the folklore of our coast-wise fishing communities, often…
Colm Fitzpatrick
Chai Brady
Peter Costello
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Rory Fitzgerald