“I wish it was Tuesday already. Can we please skip the days in between?” It is my daughter’s birthday next week and while her excitement is nearly too much for her to handle, hearing those words nearly creates a knot in my stomach. Skipping a day or two, even a year or two brings back memories…
Category: Your Faith
Encouraging others to go and preach the Gospel
Personal Profile Fr John Harris OP was set on the path to the priesthood from the age of seven, and hasn’t looked back since. Elected last year as the provincial for the Dominicans in Ireland, he sees his task as being to encourage his brethren to preach the Gospel. “My vocation story is very boring,”…
Trying not to make God look bad
For 15 years, I taught a course entitled The Theology of God. The students in that course were predominately seminarians preparing for ministry, along with a number of lay students who were preparing to serve as ministers in various capacities in their churches. I would always teach what the curriculum called for: the key biblical…
Teaming up to tackle Lent as a couple
Marta Osborne Do you have any suggestions for approaching lent with your spouse? I think we’d be more successful if we tried to go through it together. Lent is difficult at the best of times, but it can be especially so if we try to go it alone. As married couples, we’re blessed to have…
Hitting the ground running this Lent
Lent is the ultimate time for re-focusing on the most important things in life, writes Jason Osborne Life is a hectic thing. Work, family, hobbies and many, many other things vie for our attention and demand our efforts day in, day out. These are all very good things, of course, but none of them are…
Family News
Man tests positive for Covid for 14 months straight When Muzaffer Kayasan first caught Covid-19, he thought he was destined to die, as he was already suffering from leukaemia. Fourteen months and 78 straight positive tests later, he is still alive – and still battling to shake off the infection. Mr Kayasan, 56, has Turkey’s…
The perfect ritual
Sometimes it takes an outsider to help you to see the beauty and depth of something you have never fully appreciated. I suspect this true for many of us, myself no exception, regarding the celebration of the Eucharist in our churches. David P. Gushee, an Evangelical, recently published a book entitled After Evangelicalism, within which…
Your words flow out of what fills your heart
The Sunday Gospel On this Sunday we have the third extract from the great sermon on the plain where Jesus sets out the ideals of Christian life. Last Sunday we reflected on the ideal of being forgiving and compassionate like our Father in heaven. The ideal is beyond human nature unaided, but with the supernatural…
The facts of Covid-19
Medical Matters Nearly one in five people or just over 1.25 million have tested PCR positive for Covid in Ireland since the pandemic began. With hundreds of thousands more infected but not officially tested the proportion of the population that have escaped Covid may be a lot smaller than many would have anticipated. The death…
Sharing a passion for youth formation
Personal Profile Charlotte Gormley’s faith is grounded in her experience of well-run youth retreats. Having been raised in a Catholic family, retreats during her teenage years reinvigorated her faith. Now, having taken on the role of faith formation co-ordinator for the parishes of Banagher and Claudy, she hopes to give back what she has received.…


Ruadhán Jones
Fr Ronald Rolheiser





Dr Kevin McCarroll
