David Quinn casts his eagle eye over who was hot and who was not in the secular world   In the run-up to Christmas, Pope Francis noted that out of a sense of “false respect” for non-Christians we are airbrushing Christ and Christianity from the festival. The Pope said: “In the name of a false…

Taste is subjective. Keep that in mind as I share with you the 10 books that most touched me last year. That isn’t necessarily a recommendation that you read them. They may leave you cold, or angry at me that I praised them. Be your own critic here and one who isn’t afraid to be…

The Notebook Fr Bernard Healy   The release of an animated movie called The Star caught my attention. The premise of the film – an imaginative telling of the Nativity focusing on the donkey and his animal companions reminded me that we have a plethora of traditions about various animals associated with the Christmas story.…

Bishop George Bell was a notable Church of England bishop who might well have become Archbishop of Canterbury, but Winston Churchill disliked Bishop’s Bell’s opposition to aerial area bombing during World War II and probably blocked his candidature. Dr Bell described the bombing of unarmed women and children as “barbaric” in 1941. He was a…

The View   T.S. Eliot is one of my favourite poets, and I particularly love parts of the ‘Four Quartets’, although I don’t pretend to understand fully his work. ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of the ‘Four Quartets’, contains references to summer and autumn, but for some reason, I often think of parts of it as…

Legally speaking marriage is now only a friendship pact, writes David Quinn   Two male friends are to marry shortly so one can avoid paying inheritance tax when the other dies. Neither of the two men is gay and the marriage will be totally legitimate in the eyes of the law. Revenue has confirmed to…

The Christmas story is surely one of the greatest stories ever told. It chronicles a birth from which the world records time as before or after. Moreover, it is written in a way that has inflamed the romantic imagination for 2,000 years. This hasn’t always been for the good. Beyond spawning every kind of legend…

The Notebook Bernard Cotter   “You’ll be very busy coming up to Christmas, Father.” As a newly-ordained priest, this frequently-repeated greeting in November and December confused me. I couldn’t figure how Christmas could make life even busier for me than every other month. I asked my senior and wiser colleague, who explained gently that I…

I tend to send Christmas cards in fits and starts (and I still adhere to the old French custom that Christmas greetings can be sent well into January – certainly until Epiphany on January 6). But a melancholy aspect of leaving through my address book in December is to note the little cross I put against…

It may now be time for the Gardaí to act on the murky world of foreign funding of political campaigns in Ireland, writes Greg Daly   “As you will appreciate, ‘garnering support for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution’ clearly falls within the definition of political purpose,” the Standards in Public…