2023 Vol 112
Showing 1–12 of 27 results
Timothy Quinlan
Contents
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A Pilgrim Church – Responding in Uncertain Times
Timothy Quinlan
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Having spent some thirty years (1980–2010) teaching religion at second level in a Dublin city school, I can confirm from personal experience many of the contentions about the steady decline of the influence of the Catholic Church as detailed in Derek Scally’s book The Best Catholics in the World and as it is reflected in the broad range of articles in response to its publication in the autumn 2022 issue of Studies.
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Cardinal Owen McCann, Angola and Mozambique: Greater Ireland Meets Greater Portugal
Alexandra Maclennan
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The first Mass in Southern Africa was celebrated by the Portuguese at Algoa Bay near Port Elizabeth, shortly after they arrived with Bartholomeu Dias in 1487. That there was a Catholic faith for the Dutch settlers to outlaw when they arrived in the Cape Peninsula in 1652 is indicative of its survival long after the Portuguese had left at the turn of the sixteenth century, and that in spite of the lack of continuity of pastoral presence and access to the sacraments. And again, in the nineteenth century, when the Irish but Lisbon-educated Dominican Patrick Griffith was sent to the Cape Colony to become the first Irish vicar apostolic in Southern Africa in 1838, and he set out to travel the length and breadth of the territory, and he found scattered Catholic families across the territory.
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Climate, Communities, and Capitalism: Critically Imagining and Co-Creating Pathways for a Sustainable Ireland
Amanda Slevin
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Wildfires, droughts, floods, beloved species facing extinction – a selection of stark indicators of the accelerating climate and ecological emergency. Underpinned by human patterns of production, consumption, and associated environmental degradation, the ‘triple planetary crises’of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution pose an existential threat to human and non-human species. Consequently, socio-ecological and scientific imperatives for urgent, transformative action have become firmly established, yet with only a few years to 2030 (a landmark year for climate commitments) our shared island, encompassing people on both sides of Ireland’s politically constructed border, is woefully unprepared to tackle the massive difficulties we collectively face.
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Confronting the Past for the Sake of the Future
Séamus Murphy SJ
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The 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement outlined structures of power-sharing in Northern Ireland and supporting roles for the British and Irish governments. It also contained something new in Irish history, namely, a commitment by unionist and nationalist representatives to the following principles:
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Frances Biggs and the Windows of Gonzaga College, Dublin
Declan O’Keeffe
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Gonzaga College SJ, named after St Aloysius Gonzaga, one of St Ignatius’s initial companions, was founded in 1950 in the leafy suburb of Ranelagh, Dublin 6. For the first fifteen years it did not have a chapel, as other things took priority, and religious services took place in the concert hall, which required moving furniture in and out on every occasion. When Fr John Hughes SJ took over as rector in 1959, the first priority of his office was to provide a chapel. In May of 1962 a working committee was established and parents were persuaded to part with £100 each, spread over ten years. In the account of William Lee SJ, ‘[t]he quality of that cut-granite, copper-roofed building dictated to a large extent the quality of the new school Chapel. The fact that Mr Andrew Devane was architect for both buildings ensured that the standard was maintained … The sculptor Mr Michael Biggs was commissioned to do the altar, the ambo, and the tabernacle pillar … The stained glass window at the apex of the triangular building was the work of Mrs Frances Biggs.’
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Gnostic Undercurrents in Our Avatar Culture
Fiachra Long
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We are sometimes attracted by a striking, colourful and convenient initiative, but like the apparent bargain that flatters to deceive, or the colourful mushroom that turns out to be poisonous, some level of discretion is advised. The emergence of ChatGPT as the lead Artificial Intelligence platform is striking, colourful and convenient, but a high level of discretion is urgently advised.
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Imagining Kells: A Poetic Meditation on the Book of Kells
James Harpur
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In 2018 I published a book of poems, The White Silhouette, that mainly focused on Christian spirituality and mysticism. At its centre was a four-part meditative poem inspired by the Book of Kells that took me nineteen years, on and off, to complete. In this essay I hope to describe my fascination with the Book of Kells and some of the themes and questions that emerged in my poem, such as: ‘Can sacred art effect a fundamental change of consciousness in the beholder?’ ‘How much does it help to be a believer to appreciate the Book of Kells?’ ‘What is the function of the Book of Kells in the twenty-first century?
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Irish, ‘Celtic’, and the Future
Alan Titley
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When I was asked to imagine Ireland, and the place that the Irish language, literature, and culture might have in it in 2030, I had to swallow hard. It is difficult enough to examine a past that is always changing, almost impossible to assess a present that is in constant flux: so what chance is there to imagine a future that will never be what we think?
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Living Lightly on Our Planet: Challenges for Ireland
Peadar Kirby
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At the time of writing this article in the autumn of 2022, a slew of authoritative reports and studies underline the extremely precarious nature of the current situation facing humanity and the other species with which we share this beautiful planet. To take a few examples:
• The UN Emissions Gap Report showed that updated national emission-reduction pledges since the Glasgow climate summit in late 2021 make a negligible difference to predicted 2030 emissions and that we are far from the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.
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Maria Edgeworth: Distinguishing the Irish Anglican Ascendancy from the English
David Clare
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In his 1922 novel Ulysses, James Joyce included a fictionalised depiction of the time he spent living in a Martello Tower in Sandycove, County Dublin, but he turned his real-life roommate –Samuel Chenevix Trench, a member of the Irish Anglican Ascendancy – into the Stage English character Haines. In 1983, when UTV, RTÉ, and Channel Four co-operated in creating the Irish R.M. television series, based on short stories by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, they elected to cast the English actor Peter Bowles as Major Yeates and to change the Major from an upper middle class Irish Anglican to an Englishman.
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Newman’s Idea of a Tutor and its Implementation at the Catholic University
Paul Shrimpton
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John Henry Newman was invited to become the founding rector of the Catholic University in July 1851. Soon after accepting he announced his intention to combine the professorial and tutorial systems in his plans, adding that ‘the principal making of men must be by the Tutorial system’. A year later, he explained that at Oxford the ‘real working men were, not the Professors, but the Tutors’, and that he wished this to be the case in Dublin as well.
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Newman’s Idea of a University
Finola Kennedy
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Newman’s journey to Dublin began with an invitation in 1851 from Archbishop Cullen of Armagh – shortly afterwards to become Archbishop of Dublin – to advise on the proposed establishment of a Catholic University. He also asked Newman if he ‘could spare time to give us a few lectures on education’. These ‘few lectures’ would form the Dublin Discourses and ultimately The Idea of a University. There was a total of nine discourses, five of which were delivered in Dublin.