Tony Flannery

Ireland in the 1980s was not the dark ages ​​Western People 17.12.2024

It’s not news anymore that religion, particularly the Catholic religion, is now either no news or bad news. That’s obvious in both the general and the particular. 

An example of the first is that, since the recent retirement of Patsy McGarry from the Irish Times no Irish paper any longer carries a designated religious affairs correspondent. 

An example of the second is that one of the most popular programmes on RTÉ Radio, Liveline, today seems only interested in religion when it affords an opportunity to disparage and disembowel with apparent relish all things Catholic.

Brian Thomas Swimme.

I had just finished my lecture on Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The mathematical equations for one of his basic ideas, the so-called invariance of the space-time interval, filled the blackboards. I still had twenty minutes to spare. Perhaps I had galloped through the details too fast. I tended to overprepare for this course since it was loaded with some of the best students on campus, including Oona Fitzgerald who had scored a perfect 1600 on her SATs. 

My deepest self-definition is that I am a Christian, by which I mean that in Jesus of Nazareth I believe I see the meaning of God most clearly. This experience of an in-breaking divine presence is what I believe created the Christmas traditions that you refer to in your question. Certainly during this season they are omnipresent.

It was more than two thousand years ago that the historic figure we call Jesus lived.