A little girl grew here For her, a brownstone house was home, Its fireside love and peace. The blossoming hedgerows sang freedom The river told stories of places far away, While beyond, dreaming mountains called. A little girl grew here. Because of her, Children in far-off lands learn love and freedom Living water flows for…
Cities collect memories in peculiar ways. Sometimes a place becomes part of your life without you ever deciding that it should. There is one hotel in Dublin like that for me. The Herbert Park Hotel in Ballsbridge, close to the American Embassy. I had been going there for many years, for meetings, for New Year’s…
The Pope and I have a shared favourite spiritual teacher. Sadly, the resemblance ends there, because Pope Leo lives by the teachings. While I would love to, I just don’t. The spiritual teacher is Bro. Lawrence, a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother. He served as a foot soldier in the Thirty Years’ War. An injury left…
Nathan Carter’s cancelled concert in St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Boyle, Co. Roscommon, has raised questions about music in churches. But the conversation should extend beyond one event to the purpose of our churches and the responsibility involved in bringing music into sacred space. Having sung Christian music across different traditions for many years,…
Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Pope Francis’s 2016 exhortation on love, marriage and family life, emerged from extensive consultation and two Synods of Bishops. Ten years later, Pope Leo XIV called an Assembly of families, bishops and experts in Rome to take stock. What are the takeaways? The Synthesis Report has not yet been published,…
When it comes to keeping public discourse moderate in tone, measured in content and focused on persuasion rather than coercion, most of us would expect more from a politician than a pop star. Recently, PBP politician Richard Boyd Barrett and pop idol Ed Sheeran showed this can be completely the other way round. Ed Sheeran,…
For generations of young GAA players, the dream is remarkably simple: pull on the jersey of your county, walk onto the hallowed turf of Croke Park and, one day, climb the steps of the Hogan Stand. For John O’Dwyer, that dream began on the quiet backroads of Killenaule, where hurling consumed almost every aspect of…
I don’t know about you but I seem to keep bumping into the Antichrist recently. By that I mean when reading the news and other publications, not actually banging into the harbinger of the apocalypse on the street. This has struck me as a little unusual as it was not something that has been on…
Why the current Public Sector dispute could leave lasting scars in schools Irish schools run on goodwill. All of those things we love so much about our schools come about because of the generosity and authentic kindness of school leaders and staff. Special school events like graduations, open nights and career evenings, early‑morning rehearsals for…
Pope Leo sees AI as a powerful tool that can serve the common good, but never as a substitute for human intelligence, conscience or relationships, since it processes data without understanding meaning, love or truth. That, by the way, isn’t me. That’s Claude, the artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by the American software company Anthropic.…
Breda O'Brien