If the political will existed, there could have been a reasonable discussion about the Eighth Amendment, writes Cora Sherlock   It didn’t have to be like this. But, unfortunately, the Oireachtas committee on abortion decided otherwise from the get-go. As each week passes, this becomes clearer as one abortion advocate after another presents to the…

Spirituality   Jesus tells us that in the end we will be judged on how we dealt with the poor in our lives, but there are already dangers now, in this life, in not reaching out to the poor Here’s how Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, teases out that danger: “I’ve come to believe that the…

Notebook Martin Delaney   Some years ago while living in the Washington DC area I had an opportunity to visit the Vietnam Memorial Wall. The monument is a long black granite wall with thousands of names of those who lost their lives in the war. As I walked slowly through the memorial site a number…

I was chatting with a group of friends, and the conversation turned to the mood of the times – with particular application to the new sensitivities around sexual harassment and those who prey on young girls. “Remember that song that Maurice Chevalier used to sing, Thank Heavens for Little Girls? It would be banned if it…

The View   I recently spent a morning with religious education teachers and diocesan workers from the Diocese of Derry talking about the teaching of relationship and sex education. I met a wonderful group of lively, compassionate, caring, interested and dedicated young people. The following day in Galway, I met priests, brothers and sisters who belong to religious…

Separating sex and love has been a disaster for men and women, writes David Quinn   Even Freud believed a certain amount of repression of our instincts was necessary to civilisation. Freud was the ‘patron saint’ of anti-repression but he saw that a certain amount of repression, or to put it another way, of ‘civilised…

Veritas is finally profitable again, but that’s no reason to rest easy, writes Greg Daly   It’s taken a long time, but Ireland’s biggest religious publishing and retail company has finally – and tentatively – returned to profitability. Veritas, the Irish bishops’ publishing arm, has been struggling for years, battling with an uncertain retail climate…

With fantasy fiction set to dominate television again this Christmas, Niall Gooch regrets that filmmakers often get it so wrong   I’ve known some pretty crushing cinematic disappointments. There were the Star Wars prequels; two total disasters and one that occasionally rose to the level of watchable mediocrity (fortunately the series seems to be recovering…

Spirituality   Several years ago I received an email that literally stopped my breath. A man who had been for many years an intellectual and Faith mentor to me, a man whom I thoroughly trusted and a man with whom I had developed a life-giving friendship, had killed both his wife and himself in a…

The Notebook Fr Vincent Sherlock   I listened recently to Playback on RTE RADIO 1. It’s an enjoyable show that gives snippets from the previous week’s programmes. Of course, Player and Podcasts have, in many ways, rendered it a less than vital piece of radio time but there’s still something engaging about it. I heard…