The murder of Ashling Murphy was so atrocious, so shocking, so extremely distressing in every way that it was understandable that, immediately, both politicians and people sought to apply blame. Some specific individual is to blame – the person who carried out this brutal and unspeakable crime – but in the immediate aftermath, since there…

The destructive nature of pornography is completely ignored in modern Ireland, writes Jason Osborne The recent atrocious murder of Ashling Murphy has sparked intense national debate about the treatment of women in Ireland, and a concurrent discussion about the perceived flawed state of modern masculinity. Leaving aside the merits or deficiencies of this argument, one…

The View It can be hard to remember a time when there was no social media, when communication was verbal, or written on pieces of paper which were then dispatched to places far and near. With such means of interaction a responsibility normally attached to how we interacted with others. Any untruth, any calumny or…

We are now being asked to reject the whole of our histories for not matching the standards of the present, writes David Quinn If you ran an opinion poll and asked people if they understand what is meant by ‘cancel culture’, how many would say ‘yes’, and of those who did, how many would mean…

The only place in the Middle East where Christians truly flourish is in the Jewish state, writes Lironne Bar Sadeh As is their unfortunate habit each Christmas, this year, too, the Anglican archbishops Justin Welby of Canterbury and Hosan Naoum of Jerusalem ascribed a “steady stream of Palestinian Christians leaving the Holy Land” to settler…

When Italy recently celebrated a state funeral for David Sassoli, the President of the European Parliament who died unexpectedly from Legionnaire’s disease on January 11, the Mass was held in Rome’s Basilica of St Mary of the Angels and attended by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, Prime Minister Mario Draghi, European President Ursula…

For more than 130 years, popes have considered work, the treatment of workers and the creation of jobs to be a religious and moral issue. And while Pope Francis has not written an encyclical dedicated to labour like Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 and St John Paul II did in 1981, he has ensured…

In the world of the arts, they make a distinction between persons who create an artifact, an artist, a sculptor, or a novelist, and persons who write about artists and their works. We have novelists and literary critics, artists and art critics, and both are important. Critics keep art and literature from bad form, sentimentality,…

Notebook On a June evening in 1963, as Pope John XXIII lay dying, a strange sight appeared in St Peter’s Square: the chief rabbi of Rome, with a crowd of Roman Jews, gathering with their Catholic fellow citizens to honour Pope John. During his papacy he had made several important gestures of friendship towards Judaism,…