Articles

A complete chronological listing of shorter pieces written since 1995.

Any of these articles that are not the copyright of a specified publication may be freely copied and distributed.

Articles are listed in inverse chronological order – i.e. more recent articles first.

  • The Lost Sin
    The Furrow 2003
    As part of his ‘progressive’ assault on the Old Testament, the retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, J S Spong, inquired scornfully “Who nowadays covets his neighbour’s ox or donkey?” However, if we are to believe the French Catholic anthropologist René Girard, the whole of Christian revelation pivots on covetousness - wanting what seems to give our neighbour greater dignity. Why is it that the obvious human tendency to imitate the desires of others has so long escaped the attention of Christian moralists, including Catholic bishops?

  • Northern Ireland: Christians in Conflict?
    Doctrine and Life Sep 2003
    The clichéd opinion that violence in Northern Ireland is driven primarily by religious differences has never been tested against the evidence. In fact what drives the extremes on both sides in NI is reciprocal envy - imitation of the other's desire for ascendancy. This is covetousness - against which all Christians are warned by their shared sacred text. Secular ideologies can violently compete also, for exactly the same reason.

  • Reprieve!
    Reality 2003
    The lasting impact of a close encounter with the 'departure lounge' - especially gratitude for the avenue to hope provided by the Christian teaching I had received as a child.

  • ‘Ubi caritas …’
    Reality 2003
    'Where caring and love are, God is there also' - how this hymn came to change important relationships, and deepen my understanding, at a time of serious illness.

  • “You have possibly incurable cancer.”
    Reality Aug 2003
    How an experience of a possibly terminal cancer helped to change radically my understanding of prayer in the summer of 2003. And how that change impacted upon my entire worldview - and upon what I would then choose to write. The first of three 'notes from the departure lounge'.

  • Licensed to Kill
    Doctrine and Life 2003
    How the Popeye cartoon, the James Bond movie franchise and the Babylonian creation myth known as the Enuma Elish help to explain the foreign policy of the Bush administration in the US.

  • Consecrating the World?
    Doctrine and Life Sep 2003
    If the role of lay people in the church is to 'consecrate the world to God' why have Irish lay people never been convened to discuss and discern what this means? And how should this duty affect our attitudes towards secularism, which sought religious freedom before the Church ever did? These questions remain unaddressed in Ireland, in the year of the 'World Meeting of Families', 2018.

  • Christianity and the Environment
    Doctrine and Life 2003
    So often scapegoated for the western imperial expansion that led to globalisation, and for the environmental crisis that has followed, the Judeo-Christian texts we call be Bible reveal the roots of sinful exploitation of the Earth's resources and the only sustainable future.

  • Restoring the Authority of the Church
    Doctrine and Life 2003
    Having lost the authority of coercive power to the Enlightenment and the authority of moral influence to media revelations of its own lack of integrity, the leadership of the church needs to realise that its authority cannot be restored if it cannot regain the trust of its own people. In the end it is those who serve the needs of the most disadvantaged members of society who maintain what authority the church has left.

  • Ireland’s Moral Ground Zero
    The Irish Times Jan 2003
    The nadir (or so we thought) of Irish political and ecclesiastical leadership in 2002.

  • Defining Clericalism
    Doctrine and Life Oct 2002
    How some recounted experiences of a rural Catholic woman in Northern Ireland since Vatican II help to illustrate and define 'clericalism' - an attitude of mind which attributes to clergy an often illusory intellectual superiority and diminishes those unordained Catholics who seek honestly to understand and express their faith.

  • “No donations without representation!”
    Reality Oct 2002
    The lay Catholic organisation 'Voice of the Faithful' was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 2002, in the wake of a major Catholic Church scandal. This article recounts the Irish influence on this movement and is followed by a Q-and-A with founder member, Dr Jim Muller.

  • Encounters with the Force
    Doctrine and Life Jul/Aug 2002
    If the Gospel story is not a 'hero' story involving sacrifice on behalf of those suffering abuse of power, what is it? Why Christians need to show interest in the 'Star Wars' movie saga if they are to persuade young people to pay attention to the greatest hero story of them all.

  • The Greatest Scandal
    Reality June 2002
    How slow were Irish bishops to see that the revelation of their failures by secular institutions was a potent cause of the growth of Irish secularism during these years. Have they grasped that message even yet - the scandalous impact on Catholic belief of unaccountable Catholic institutions that leaders have refused to reform?

  • April Epiphanies
    Doctrine and Life June 2002
    Again in 2002 I supposed that stark media revelations in the USA and Ireland of the failings of a church system that had failed to protect children must lead to radical change. Again I was mistaken: bishops who had been brought to account by secular media and courts continued to resist the obvious need to make themselves accountable to their own people, if they were to avoid scandalising and alienating them yet again.

  • Rethinking Freedom
    Spirituality 2002
    Freedom - along with equality and brotherhood - were promised by the 18th century Enlightenment, so why are we still trapped in conflict, want and fear over two centuries later? Could it be that we are mostly simply unconscious of our tendency to model our desires on those of someone else, and then to compete for what cannot be shared - the 'winner's' supremacy? Do we need to re-learn what is meant by 'the imitation of Christ' if we are to be truly free?

  • Harry Potter and the disappearing student
    Doctrine and Life Dec 2001
    Why Hogwarts School for wizards breaks up for Christmas and Easter - and why homilists have something to learn from these stories for the young people who are more often than not missing from church these days - apparently more interested in magic than in the possibility of divine inspiration.

  • The Spiritual Dimension of Mental Illness
    Doctrine and Life Nov 2001
    'Beyond Prozac' by Terry Lynch argues against a psychiatric bias in favour of mood-changing pharmaceuticals as a cure for depression - as distinct from skilled empathic counselling. Is much mental illness in fact spiritually based and rooted in a culture that leaves us far too little time for one another, vainly trying to find 'pills for everything'?

  • The Day the World Changed – 11/09/2001
    Reality Nov 2001
    How US victory in the Cold War and support for Israel 'set it up' for challenge from Islamic radicals, and why this need not lead to a 'clash of civilisation' if the US can lead the world in respect for the equality of all nations.

  • Is God Dead?
    Doctrine and Life Oct 2001
    Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead - but also explicitly justified sacrificial murder. In 'I See Satan Fall Like Lightning' René Girard argued that the archetypal modern scapegoating murder, the Holocaust, was a result of Nietsche's 'superman' programme , and that had Hitler won World War II the Nietzschean programme of undoing the compassion for victims established by the gospels could have been attempted on a vast scale. A re-learning of the Gospel's message - as a revelation of the roots of scapegoating - shows God to be fully alive in our own time.

  • Rehabilitating Satan
    The Furrow 2001
    The name 'Satan' originally meant 'the accuser' - and there is indeed a 'spirit of accusation' at work in all human conflict, a power that is clearly greater than any individual person. The danger of deriding and banishing 'Satan' from human discourse is that we humans then become even more inclined to blame and accuse one another. As René Girard argued in 'I See Satan Fall Like Lightning', the Bible is in the end much kinder to us than the Enlightenment - by blaming Satan rather than humankind for the evils we suffer.

  • The World of the Wannabe
    Spirituality 2001
    The word 'wannabe' describes a person who wants to be someone else - i.e. most teenagers today. This alienation from the self that we do not want to be is the root of the self-harming we call sin - but that self is the only person we can be. Just as well that God loves that person even so, helping us, through Jesus, to love ourselves and to heal.

  • Twelve Steps to Being Christian
    The Furrow Summer 2001
    How the twelve-step recovery programme for addictions of many different kinds can help us to renew our understanding of 'sin' and 'salvation' - and to re-understand the meaning of 'church' in a deeply addictive society.

  • Irish Catholicism: A church in need
    Céide Summer 2001
    Does the Irish Catholic Church need to hold a formal wake for a model of church that is spiritually dead, a clericalist church that turned a blind eye to social pretension because it was itself a pyramid of dignity that ignored and even practised injustice? Without such a formal recognition of the failure of a bankrupt church system, how can we build something very different?

  • Towards a New Evangelism IV: ‘Search’
    Doctrine & Life July 2001
    A simplified version of the 'Cursillo' evangelical experience for adults, the 'Search' experience for teenagers gives some of the most challenged young people in Derry a deep experience of supportive Christian community. Their young 'Search' leaders prove their readiness for serious responsibility.

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