Thankfully all 52 of our Holy Land pilgrims are safe and well after the unprecedented situation of finding ourselves in Israel when war broke out with the militant faction Hamas. The group of pilgrims arrived back in Dublin Airport on Thursday evening on a direct El Al flight from Tel Aviv, but the flight was…

“Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings, they’re your best link to your past. And the people most likely to stick with you in the future”. So wrote essayist Mary Schmich. I buried my mother at the age of 65 four years ago…

When we speak of the vocations crisis, we shouldn’t speak of it in isolation from the wider crisis of faith that we are currently experiencing in Ireland and large parts of the western world. Healthy and committed vocations only come from healthy and committed communities which can only be formed by healthy and committed families.…

The famous sociologist of religion Prof. Grace Davie coined the phrase ‘believing without belonging’ to describe the state of religion in Britain in the early 1990s. In 1994, Prof. Davie painted a stark picture of our neighbouring island as a country where church-going is largely a thing of the past, but many people still identify…

In George Orwell’s masterful novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four – which I read every summer, and eerily seems more prescient each and every year, ‘doublethink’ and ‘newspeak’ are used to describe how the establishment uses intentionally ambiguous speech to distort and obscure reality. It came to mind as I watched the hearings of the Oireachtas committee on…