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…

There was great news for Ireland last week: the population of this country is due to increase by more than a million people in the next decade or so. The prediction from the ESRI is that by 2030, the population will have grown by 1.1 million. Population increase – particularly for countries which are under-populated,…

The View   In a significant development, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Committee) has challenged its sister body, the Committee on Human Rights. Or perhaps the latter should instead be called the Committee on Human Rights for some, because it has been pushing a ‘right’ to abortion on…

Many Protestants and Catholics have found common cause in fighting for fundamental rights, the Pope should encourage this writes David Quinn   Short of some unforeseen development, Pope Francis will be here next August for the World Meeting of Families. Everything he says and does will totally overshadow everything else that takes place at the…

Merton treasured the word, writes Michael W. Higgins   Pope Francis recognised in the monk-poet Thomas Merton a prophetic and moral genius, ranked along with Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln.  And he did that in Washington, in a powerful address to the Joint Houses of Congress. Can you imagine that happening now…

Letter from Rome   Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” In the same vein, one might add that equally often, “the messenger is the message.” When you’re trying to put a human face on something, in other words, the best strategy is usually to have a genuinely decent person making the pitch.…