Month: December 2021

The important role of the Church in the EU

At a time when the European Union is facing pressure from Brexit in the west and debates regarding the EU’s fundamental values in the East, the Church has an important role to play in promoting the European project, Bishop of Down and Connor Noel Treanor tells The Irish Catholic. The inspiration for the European project…

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True Christianity in action

The Catholic chaplaincy at Queen’s University Belfast delivered over 300 shoeboxes containing essentials and Christmas treats to Belfast Homeless Services during the festive season. QUB students, their families and friends “have been incredibly generous in their support of this worthwhile cause”, the chaplaincy said in a post on Facebook. Significant donations came from the Ards…

My top 10 books for 2021

I’m not a literary critic, nor pretend to be. Simple fact, I don’t read enough. A busy, pressured life affords me only some smaller windows of time within which to read anything that’s not directly related to my ministry. Nonetheless, I try to be faithful to a discipline I set for myself years ago, namely,…

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World’s richest man argues civilisation needs more kids

Tech billionaire and Time’s 2021 Person of the Year Elon Musk has urged people to have more children, saying that low and declining birth rates are “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”. Speaking recently at a Wall Street Journal event, Mr Musk said there “are not enough people”. “I can’t emphasise this enough, there…

An uplifting insight in to monastic life

There’s usually a glut of programmes with religious elements in the media over the Christmas period, and I’m usually on the lookout for something distinctive or shows that stand out for a variety of reasons. Heaven Made at Christmas (BBC One and Two) was particularly engaging. Over two episodes on Christmas week (on repeat from…

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A difficult year to celebrate the NCH

Seasonably festooned with Christmas trees and wreathes, the National Concert Hall was in celebratory mode earlier this month. And why not? After all, it was marking its 40th anniversary with an RTÉ NSO gala under principal conductor Jaime Martín. The music brought the première of an NCH/NSO commissioned work, The Treaty Debates by Brian Byrne,…

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Family News

Using mechanical tools improves our language skills Our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences is one of the most difficult language skills to acquire. In 2019, research had revealed a correlation between being particularly proficient in tool use and having good syntactic ability. A new study, by researchers from Inserm, CNRS, Université Claude…