As people try to get the measure of Pope Leo XIV, it is natural to look to Leo XIII, who was pope from 1878 to 1903. Unsurprisingly, the focus has been primarily on Rerum Novarum, his groundbreaking encyclical on the rights of workers, the right to private property, and gospel values as opposed to the…
The ethics of artificial intelligence When friends were transcribing a mound of material recently, I shocked myself by asking. ‘Why aren’t you using AI?’ I have significant moral objections to the use of AI. The foremost one is that it is based on systemic theft of intellectual property. Large language models were trained on vast…
The role of women in the Church is contentious, even among Catholic women. Some believe that women will never be truly equal in the Church unless they are admitted to the ordained priesthood. Some emphasise women’s primary roles within family and parish settings. Others advocate for greater inclusion of women’s voices at all levels of…
A recent report in The Irish Catholic described a study by the Universities of Vienna and Sussex on spiritual boredom. When lead author, Thomas Gotz, and his team decided to investigate spiritual boredom, they discovered that there was a surprising lack of previous research. They chose five spiritual practices – yoga, meditation, pilgrimage, silent retreats…
Lent kind of crept up on me this year. I had barely adjusted to writing 2025 instead of 2024 and yet it was already Ash Wednesday. I was relieved when my nephew, Jason Conroy, asked if I wanted to be part of a WhatsApp group that would follow along with Cardinal Pell’s prison journals for…
In early February, newly appointed Minister for Education, Helen McEntee, announced the final phase of the free textbook scheme. The scheme now extends from primary schools to all post-primary students except those attending fee-charging institutions at a cost so far of €191 million. The Department of Social Protection has instituted free hot school lunches for…
Anger seems to drive our world. People were understandably and rightly angry when they were left without power or water for weeks after recent storms. However, much more toxic anger is weaponised to generate profit for cynical operators. It has been known for a long time that engagement with online content and therefore online advertising…
Jen Hogan writes a regular feature for The Irish Times, in which people in the public eye are asked the same series of questions. They range from “How agreeable are you?” to the much more serious “What do you expect to happen when you die?” I have been trying to figure out why the majority…
Recently, I was sent a video of Donald Trump tenderly cutting Kamala Harris’ hair. It was obviously a fake but good enough to cause a quick giggle. Reading last August that a private school in London had instituted the first fully AI classroom was not quite so funny. David Game College charges 20 young people…
I love the time after Christmas Day. The preparations that take up most of December are over. It’s a time to relax with family and a good book or six. The quieter days of the Christmas season lend themselves to reflection. For our family, it has been a momentous year. In August, our elder daughter,…