As we accelerate towards climate chaos, more and more people are looking to ramp off the globalist superhighway and make their way through life more slowly and simply on winding localist trails.
Next week, I will be presenting at a gathering of theologians, ethicists, and social scientists in Salzburg, Austria. The event, organised by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns, and its focus is democracy. Or more precisely, democracy under threat. For many years now, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has affirmed democracy as the… Read more »
On Wednesday evening I took part in a Hedgerows Cycle in Dublin 12 to mark National Biodiversity Week 2025. Funded by the Irish Environmental Network and co-organised by Dublin Cycling Campaign and Hedgerows Ireland, the event aimed to celebrate the biodiversity benefits of hedgerows, showcase some of the area’s hedgerows, and explore how hedges can… Read more »
All our prisons are doing is “warehousing” drug users and releasing them again, thereby ensuring that many will return to using drugs and back into prison.
If a more populist right Government, than the incumbent coalition, were to emerge in Ireland, then they have an arsenal of tools to further suppress peaceful democratic protest and respond punitively to protestors.
A Presbyterian Appreciation of Pope Francis Sometimes people ask me how I ended up directing a Jesuit social research centre, as a Presbyterian theologian. At this stage, the polite answer rolls out of my mouth with barely any thinking required. But if I was to tell the truth, I would have to say that it… Read more »
Today is the day between. Not death, not resurrection — just silence. Easter Saturday stretches out as a long pause in the Christian imagination: a space of absence, of waiting, of unknowing. It is a day we are not good at inhabiting. We prefer the drama of the Cross or the joy of the empty… Read more »
Watching the news is very tough at the moment. In this time of manufactured chaos, it’s so easy to think that individuals or communities have no power to change things. But instead of giving in to despair or apathy, we can find consolation in all the work that is happening, often by volunteers, to make… Read more »
What we are witnessing is a form of societal resignation. We tolerate a level of road danger that curtails the freedom of children to move through their communities. This is a moral issue. When we fail to police motor offences, when we design streets around the convenience of cars rather than the safety of people, we make a clear choice: to prioritise speed and flow over life and freedom.
On 13th March 2025, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice welcomed Dr Geertjan Zuijdwegt—criminologist and theologian at KU Leuven—for an expert seminar on small-scale detention and the Belgian experience of implementing this modality of punishment.
