“Soon the sun will set” — said Benjamin. “Is that prophecy? No, it’s merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events.” In A Canticle for Leibowitz, the post-apocalyptic novel by Walter M. Miller Jr, such grim ‘consistency’ refers to humanity’s habit of circling back to self-destruction. Knowledge, once rediscovered after nuclear holocaust, is…
It was a small, almost hidden message that captured the essence of Aoife Shelly’s life. In the hospital, while her family kept vigil at her bedside, an alarm went off on her phone. When they reached for it to silence the alarm, they found a note in her notifications: “10pm: Time for Prayer.” In the…
No second thoughts were needed before signing up for Dr Giulio Pugliese’s seminar on Taiwan and the Risk of World War III which took place at Villa Schifanoia, Florence on May 7. The ‘credit’ for the eye-catching title went to Dublin resident Bill Emmott, formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist magazine and now Chairman of the…
Do you remember where you were when the planes hit the Twin Towers in New York? Most people do. You may also remember where you heard the news of Princess Diana’s death. I remember both. And I also remember hearing the news that Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was on fire. I was having my…
The election of Robert Cardinal Provost as Pope has been met with a certain amount of warmth outside of the Church itself, which is surprising considering the profile of the man. In a time that sees the Church as an anachronism in the ‘developed’ world, an American ought to have felt like a step back…
Belfast’s youngest parish priest could not resist the road to Rome on May 8. Fr Conor McGrath had just marked his 38th birthday. There are only a handful of priests his age in Down and Connor where he also serves as vocations director. In the years to come, would he get another chance to see…
Last weekend, in the small, picturesque seaside town of St Agnes in Cornwall, a plaque was unveiled to the hundreds of thousands of unmarried mothers in England and Wales who had been subjected, in the past, to forced adoptions. The plaque is situated at Rosemundy, which was once a mother-and-baby home in the West of…
Naturally enough, journalists covering the Vatican tend to seek out figures in the system from their own countries or language groups. French speakers seek out the French, Spanish speakers the Spaniards and Latin Americans, the Italians gravitate to their paesani, and, by the same logic, Americans are drawn to fellow Americans. Thus it was that when…
I am writing this article while in Rome on Dominican business. By the time you read it, not only will I be back in Ireland, but there may very well be a new pope. As you can imagine there is only one topic of conversation in the city, be it in a shop, taxi, restaurant,…
The ethics of artificial intelligence When friends were transcribing a mound of material recently, I shocked myself by asking. ‘Why aren’t you using AI?’ I have significant moral objections to the use of AI. The foremost one is that it is based on systemic theft of intellectual property. Large language models were trained on vast…
Chai Brady
Martina Purdy
Mary Kenny
John L. Allen Jr.
Breda O'Brien