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,…
I don’t know whether Kate Hoey intended to be offensive when she claimed – in effect – that Nationalists/Catholics were now hogging too many of the jobs and influential positions in Northern Ireland, but that was how some people interpreted it, and offence was taken. It can be analysed as a significant social commentary on…
The View Daniel and Amy McArthur are a young couple who run a bakery in Belfast. The couple are Christians and they make clear, on the bakery’s website, that their faith is part of the business mission, stating: “Our name comes from the Bible. Asher was a tribe of Israel who had many skilled bakers and created bread…
Deliberately setting out to lead a life that will have few demands placed on you is selfish, writes David Quinn Pope Francis has landed himself in hot water after suggesting that some people might selfishly prefer pets to children. He was speaking at his usual Wednesday general audience at the Vatican and was specifically discussing…
Presumably, when the prosecutors in the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” pivoting on a failed $400 million land deal in London, rang in the New Year a few days ago, like everyone else, they wished one another a happy 2022. They may have actually said “happier,” because, let’s face it, 2021 didn’t go particularly well…
by John Lavenburg Last January when Chris Charles Scott directed a documentary about five French priests that cared for the sick through the 1873 yellow fever epidemic in Shreveport, Louisiana, he never expected that it would have a spot in this year’s Cannes World Film Festival. The expectation, Mr Scott said, was a regional and…
No one is an island; indeed, no one is ever really alone. If you are a person of faith or even just someone with a highly attuned intuitive sense, you will know that there is no such thing as a truly private act, for good or bad. Everything we do, no matter how private, affects…
Notebook There was a time when: Being a close contact was a good thing. To walk into a bank wearing a mask spelt danger! To give someone the elbow was akin to ignoring. If you sneezed, a stranger would say “God bless you”. Delta was an airline! We worried about who was in hospital and…
The French Catholic sociologist Olivier Roy has pointed that many previous concepts of ‘sin’ and ‘transgression’ have been transferred, in modern secular states, to the law, and are re-classified as ‘crimes’. A vivid example arises with the new proposed Scottish law against ‘hate crimes’, due to come into force this year. To hate someone, to…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.