The View   They do things differently in Russia. According to newspaper reports (Le Monde, March 4), President Vladimir Putin intends to introduce a reference to God into the Russian Constitution, similar to the preamble to Bunreacht na hÉireann. It will invoke ‘the memory of our ancestors who have transmitted to us ideals and faith…

The Lord provides us with the means to pass through the challenges that life provides, if we are willing to listen, writes David Quinn   “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” These…

Faced with coronavirus, the question is not so much why but how can we respond as people of Faith writes Bairbre Cahill   “Who do you say I am?” It is a question Jesus poses to the apostles in Mark 8:29 and which is being posed to us now too. I came across someone recently…

The virus has demonstrated that we still have the national capacity to come together and unite against a common threat, writes John McGuirk   This column is usually about criticising politicians and identifying all the things wrong with the country. No doubt, it will be just that again in the future, but it’s been very…

For most of my lifetime, the material circumstances of our lives have steadily improved. The panic-buying of toilet paper – perhaps worse in Britain than in Ireland – illuminates just how spoiled, even decadent, we have become. In my childhood, back in the 1950s, it wasn’t unusual to enter a loo and find squares cut…

Amid the scramble to find a cure for the coronavirus and enforcing restrictive measures to try to slow down its expansion, there has been relatively little attention to the underlying factors which explain why some places have been harder hit, more quickly, than others. One emerging hypothesis is that there may be a correlation between…

A leading trailblazer in the fight against clergy sexual abuse is to receive the highest honour in the US Church. On March 22, the University of Notre Dame announced that Dr Kathleen McChesney, who worked for decades in law enforcement before being tapped to establish and lead the Office of Child Protection for the United States…

In 1985, Nobel Prize winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published a novel entitled, Love in the Time of Cholera. It tells a colourful story of how life can still be generative, despite an epidemic. Well what’s besetting our world right now is not cholera but the Coronavirus, Covid-19. Nothing in my lifetime has ever affected…

Notebook   As I write from a preternaturally quiet Rome, Italy is about to enter the third week of her coronavirus lockdown and Ireland is ramping up her own quarantine measures to slow the spread of disease and avoid the harrowing experience of the North of Italy. That word quarantine has religious roots. It comes…

The View   The world is a very strange place today. Whereas a couple of weeks ago we were focused almost entirely on Brexit, wondering how everything would work out, today, it seems to me we are in an entirely different world. Outwardly it looks the same; but it is utterly changed. Now we are…