Over the past forty-eight hours a great many people on social media reacted to my thoughts on this subject with a great deal of anger and frustration. Many of those who replied to me were perfectly sincere, believing that what I had done endangered the rights of ‘real women.’ Others were more extreme; many of whom branded me a misogynist, as a man who supported violence against women, as someone who would subject women and girls to ‘rapists,’ ‘predators,’ ‘perverts,’ ‘peeping Toms,’ ‘men in dresses,’ and ‘abusers’ in ladies’ toilets and other female-only spaces.
Question and Answer
But how does one go about translating the theological equivalent of Donne’s “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” to an angsty teenager in 2019? How is this shared with a youngster, the product of capitalistic and atomised personal nihilism and pervasive cultural pessimism? Nothing makes me fear for the future of faith more than the thought that an uncrossable chasm has opened between the generations of our grandparents and that of their grandchildren.
Hero of Piper Alpha
At twenty-seven years of age, Seán was a broken man. The trauma of what he witnessed and the effects of his near drowning caused him a severe emotional and psychic collapse, the ripples of which washed up against him – sometimes pulling him back under – for the rest of his life. His bi-polar disorder produced a curious older man; someone who would laugh with all the joy of life and sink into the bleakest recesses of the valley of the shadow of death – sometimes in the same day.
Thirteen Hundred and Fourteen
Other than being the place of sacrifice and memory it is, Bannockburn is our place – here and now we have made it our Scotland in miniature; a snow globe of the country we have together imagined and hold as precious as a newborn baby in our arms. Together we brought this miracle of Scotland into the world and nothing – nothing – will prise it from us now. We are standing in the birthplace of what will become in our days the world’s newest state. You did this!
Manchester
A concert venue packed to the gunwales with kids, teenagers, and parents having the time of their lives, targeted and bombed. Twitter was full of images of happy looking youngsters, pictures taken from their social media profiles, with words begging a helpless internet to help find them; asking us to tell them to call home, to check in.
Islam and Christianity are Not at War
After decades of anti-Christian violence in Egypt the Coptic Orthodox Christians have once again become the victims of a terrorist attack in Cairo. As people prayed this morning at St. Peter and St. Paul church, adjoining St. Mark’s cathedral, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device killing 24 worshippers – mainly women and children.
Have I Become Dublin’s Gay Jesus?
This little man’s bible, his instrument of hatred and torture, his upside-down roadmap to hellfire, was the word of his god. No doubt his slavery to it already had him living a bleak and dismal living hell, and he is to be pitied for that.
Is Love Really a Second Hand Emotion?
Love is our bliss, a scent of the warmth and welcome of eternity captured in a look or a glance. Love is seeing the other as the perfection they are and knowing that all the world was made for them, and that every colour would lose its brightness without them.
