Every time you go from one neighbourhood and enter another and see an inequality and say ‘that is the way it is’ you are calling that which is demonic, natural.

In 2006, in the North-East Inner-City of Dublin alone, the scale of the change in the religious landscape was staggering and evident to those paying attention.

Written by Céire Kealty Céire Kealty is a PhD candidate in Theology at Villanova University and freelance writer, exploring Christian spirituality, environmental ethics, and the global garment industry. Restless Distractions In his work Confessions, St. Augustine identifies a deep restlessness in every human heart. He insists that this restlessness finds its release in God;[1] advertisers… Read more »

In the 1970s, James Cone shocked the church from its immoral slumber on racism by declaring that God is black. Horne reminds us that Christ is Traveller.

How did a Presbyterian from Ballymena, the Bible Belt of Northern Ireland, end up in a private audience with the Pope? It is quite a journey. It is my journey. I am so thankful for that journey, everywhere God has led me, everything God has taught me, all that I have experienced, got wrong, confessed and, like that clerical collar, made right again. I am most surprised and privileged at reaching this particular destination on my journey.

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.

Ireland spends just 0.2% of its GDP on childcare each year, investing the smallest percentage of its GDP in early years of any developed country, and with the greatest reliance on private services. The average spend across Europe is four times as high. When it comes to old age spending, Ireland also sits at the bottom of the league table at 3.4%.

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.

Humans, it seems, cannot inhabit our status of insider without framing it against outsiders. This is one of the reasons why we should be sceptical of easy claims grounded in concepts like inclusion and tolerance – not because those are not virtuous things to achieve – but because if we believe we arrive at them without difficulty we are deluded.

Theology turns out to have something significant to say to our young student and to society more widely. It can help us discover that there are ways to get at the injustice of an indebted society that predate Marx and his many descendants.