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Fiachra Long

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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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  • Going Deep, Going Forth, Going Together’, Part II- Seeking Meaning in a Transformed World

    Brendan Leahy

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    In the first part of this article,1 I looked at the reception of the Second Vatican Council’s teachings, indicating briefly how Pope Francis’s papacy is marking a phase in that reception. I want now to offer a reflection on how three of the social and cultural developments in Ireland of the past decades, when read in the light of Vatican II as reflected in Pope Francis’s teaching and actions, indicate directions for our deeper reception of the Council in Ireland.

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  • Heaney’s The Cure at Troy and the Christian Virtue of Hope

    Paul Corcoran

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    The penultimate chorus of Seamus Heaney’s Cure at Troy contains perhaps the poet’s most oft-quoted words. They cap the tone of a work that ‘proceeds from, and ends in, optimism’

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  • Heroes and Villains: A Historian’s Check-List

    Felix M Larkin

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    Historians like me are trained to think about significant figures from the past not as heroes or villains, but in a more nuanced way.

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  • Hitler Looks West- An Irish Diplomat’s Unwitting Role in the Plan to Alter Irish Neutrality

    Barry Whelan

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    On 24 August 1942 Ireland’s diplomatic representative to Spain, Leopold Kerney, met a senior figure in the SS (Schutzstaffel), Dr Edmund Veesenmayer, in a Madrid Café. The German had travelled under false papers on a special mission approved by the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentropp, to sound Kerney out on Ireland’s willingness to to alter its neutral policy in the war.

     

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  • Home Truths: Irish Neoliberalism’s Eclipse of Irish Catholicism

    Kevin Hargaden

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    At one stage in Derek Scally’s brilliant journalistic account of the collapse of the influence of the Irish Catholic Church, he compares the institution to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Thinking about the Irish Catholic Church as a ‘leaning tower of piety’ is an interesting image, because it is widely understood today that the famous white marble bell tower does not simply have a precipitous tilt because of faulty foundations.

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  • Hopkins and Lanier: A Transatlantic Note

    Gerald Roberts

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    At the time in April 1884 when he became (briefly) acquainted with the name of the American poet Sidney Lanier some three years after the latter’s death, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s knowledge of his transatlantic contemporaries was certainly very limited.

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  • Hopkins’s Use of Biblical Stories in his Shipwreck Poems

    Patrick Samway SJ

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    Patrick Samway SJ

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  • How Did We Get Here? Reflections towards a Philosophy of the Present

    Philipp W Rosemann

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    Explaining the present has always been one of the preoccupations of philosophy, and of modern philosophy in particular. Kant, in his celebrated essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’; Hegel in his speculative metaphysics of history; Nietzsche in his declaration that ‘God is dead’; Heidegger in his reflections on ‘the end of philosophy and the task of thinking’ – all these philosophers, and others, have attempted to offer an account of their present conditions. This essay takes up the same task, but with the precise goal of shedding light upon the intellectual substructure (one could say) of Irish life in the 2020s.

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  • Human Suffering and Human Dignity

    Gerry O’Hanlon SJ

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    The immediate trigger for these reflections is the Dying with Dignity Bill 2020. This Private Members’ Bill intends to give patients with a progressive and incurable terminal illness a choice to avail of ‘assisted dying’. Its chief sponsor, Gino Kenny TD, has acknowledged that this is ‘a profoundly difficult subject, no matter what side you’re on’ and called for ‘a respectful, rational and meaningful debate’.

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  • Ignatius of Loyola: Apostle to the Muslims

    Damian Howard SJ

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    Ignatius of Loyola:  Apostle to the Muslims

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  • Illuminating Dark Times- The Surprising Relevance of Catholic Social Teaching

    Anna Rowlands

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    In 1968 the social philosopher and sometime critic of Christianity Hannah Arendt published a book in homage to Bertolt Brecht’s poem, ‘To Posterity’, which begins with the following stanza:

    Indeed I live in the dark times!
    A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
    A hard heart. He who laughs
    Has not yet heard
    The terrible tidings.

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