Kevin Hargaden Kevin Hargaden is the Director and Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. Ten years ago, Pope Francis gave the Church and the world a great gift. Laudato Si’ was not just an encyclical. It was a turning point: a summons to conversion, a prophetic warning, and a charter for… Read more »

Against the dark night sky at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos both gave the Black Power salute in the iconic photo, Australian sprinter Peter Norman is easy to miss. As the Star-Spangled Banner played in the thin air, the salute was a very public act of defiance in front… Read more »

Dr Ciara Murphy “Every war leaves our world worse than it was before. War is a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful capitulation, a stinging defeat before the forces of evil.” Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti articulates the utter devastation which war leaves in its wake.1 As the Irish… Read more »

Martin Luther King famously said that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”1 The ordinary people of the North-East Inner-City were not involved in the riots; they are its victims. But their voices remain largely unheard. We hope that this issue of Working Notes helps raise the voices of the people of the North-East Inner- City and that the many brilliant initiatives they sustain become more famous than the tired stereotypes and caricatures that seem to dominate among our political leadership. My neighbours deserve that.

The Just Wage Initiative is an interdisciplinary project based in Notre Dame University’s Center for Social Concerns. Working since 2017, and deeply rooted in the Catholic Social Teaching tradition, this initiative has established seven basic criteria which must be met to ensure a given wage is just. Developed between academics, employers, employees, and other stakeholders,… Read more »

Prejudice against Travellers seems like the last acceptable form of bigotry, and excuses for it are rife. Despite the progress we have made in recent decades in how we perceive and treat members of minority groups, and our rightful abhorrence of racism, it is still acceptable in most company to refer to the ‘problems’ with this group and how it is really their own fault that we exclude them from our settled mainstream society.

I have suggested that rehabilitation is a noble pursuit because it is a creative act and requires vision and imagination. But these insightful essays, taken as a whole illustrate that rehabilitation is an act of hope.

Reading these essays, the threads that interconnect the different elements of care in our society are clear. When you lack care for one aspect of existence it is easy to imagine this seeping into all other areas.

  2021 marks the centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It is an apt moment to take stock of the history of policies pursued in the State since then, focusing particularly on the areas that comprise the core of our work in the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. We begin with a… Read more »

Debt is where dreams go to die. We put aside ‘unnecessary’ things like our hopes of becoming an artist or musician. There are monthly repayments to be made, and so we need to work, and work, until (if we are fortunate) we can retire and enjoy a few years of glorious unproductivity before death.