Recently NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into space, the biggest and most expensive telescope ever built. It will take six months for it to travel a million miles from the earth, find its permanent place in space, and then start transmitting pictures back to earth. Those pictures will be such as have never…
Like many other families we went for a walk after Christmas. The rain from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day had turned the streets/paths into a pool of puddles to the delight of my children. It was a fantastic distraction as they would walk five kilometres easily jumping from puddle to puddle. As the children were…
Egyptian pharaoh’s mummy digitally unwrapped for first time The mummified body of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh has been studied for the first time in millennia after being digitally “unwrapped”. The mummy of Amenhotep I, who ruled from 1525 to 1504 BC, was found at a site in Deir el-Bahari 140 years ago. However, archaeologists have…
Everyday Philosophy If you think about the intellectual virtues needed to be a good philosopher, or just a good thinker, ‘humility’ doesn’t immediately spring to mind. The way philosophers conduct themselves may have something to do with this, but it’s also just not the most intuitive or obvious answer. ‘Curiosity’ comes to mind before it…
While Christmas Day may be behind us, for us Catholics, Christmas has just begun. Many of us mutter and grumble about the overwhelming commercialisation of the Christmas season in Ireland today, and often with good reason. It does seem as though Christ has been lost in the frenzied rush of buying, wrapping, partying and eating…
The Gospel for this Sunday is the prologue of the Gospel of John. For the past week we have had the stories of the birth of Jesus and the events of his early life. But John begins with a vast timescale of God’s action, going back to the eons before creation and then advances through…
Personal Profile Massachusetts native Fr Gary Chamberland CSC has been rector of the Notre-Dame Centre for Faith and Reason in Dublin at University Church, St Stephen’s Green for a little over a year-and-a-half. Undertaking the role in July 2020, Fr Chamberland has already faced unprecedented challenges during his ministry in Ireland, with Covid dampening the priest’s ambitious plans. But as Fr Chamberland’s pathway…
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health has been considerable with a marked a rise in loneliness and social isolation over the past 18 months. While studies show that all ages of the population have been affected, it points to a disproportionate impact on younger adults who have felt the brunt of Covid…
Living Laudato Si At COP26 in Glasgow there were many disappointments especially in the failure of our world leaders to act with the urgency that is needed to respond to the ecological crises we face. Many people came away disappointed, frightened and in despair. However, there was another COP26 story which I witnessed and that…
I’m not a literary critic, nor pretend to be. Simple fact, I don’t read enough. A busy, pressured life affords me only some smaller windows of time within which to read anything that’s not directly related to my ministry. Nonetheless, I try to be faithful to a discipline I set for myself years ago, namely,…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Ben Conroy
Dr Kevin McCarroll