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.

  • 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.

  • Towards a New Evangelism III: United Christian Aid
    Doctrine & Life June 2001
    How the most awful of experiences - the murder of an only son - changed Michael McGoldrick and his wife Bridie when they turned to prayer. With the Mayoman Tom Lennon they soon set to work on behalf of some of the poorest in eastern Europe, proving again that the most effective evangelisation is heroic Christian action.

  • Towards a New Evangelism II: The Cursillo in Derry
    Doctrine & Life May 2001
    How the different and often deeply traumatic experiences of Derry men and women can become stories of deep Christian conversion, and how the 'Cursillo' evangelical weekend at Termonbacca monastery allows them to be told in a context of celebration and renewal.

  • Towards a New Evangelism I: What’s so good about the ‘Good News’?
    Doctrine & Life Apr 2001
    How are we to understand and practise 'evangelisation' in Ireland, in the aftermath of deep clerical scandal and the alienation caused by Christian fundamentalism? Do we first need to realise that the period of history known as 'Christendom' is over and to return to the church's original mission - to address the injustices that still foster ill health and serious want in Irish society?

  • Understanding the Downward Journey
    © Spirituality 2001
    To seek self-esteem by gaining the esteem of others is a mistake. That is the upward journey to acclaim, when paradoxically it is only through the granting of esteem to others - the downward journey travelled by Jesus - that we can find true happiness.

  • Protecting the Absolute Truth
    © Doctrine & Life March 2001

    Why the Creed needs to include the obligation of a love of neighbour that forbids us to even think of imposing our own beliefs upon anyone. And why we need to understand that Jesus subverted all power systems by refusing to compel anyone to follow him.

  • World and Church Revisited
    Doctrine and Life February 2001

    'Worldliness' as the seeking of esteem from our neighbour, a problem from which churchmen are not immune. Why we need to study the different senses in which the word 'world' occurs in the Bible if we are to agree on what needs to change, and on what should not.

  • The Myth of Materialism
    © Doctrine and Life January 2001
    In diagnosing material accumulation as materialism Catholic churchmen mislead themselves on its root cause - that uncertainty about our own status that tells us we 'need' the objects owned by celebrities. Bishops who constantly seek preferment to a more prestigious diocese have exactly the same problem.

  • Rejecting the poison chalice of church-state unity
    ©The Irish Times 2000
    Memory and Reconciliation, the Jubilee document by Pope John Paul II that acknowledged most of the mistakes of the Church under Christendom, did not provide a scriptural rationale for the principle of religious freedom, or acknowledge the danger of too close a relationship between church and state.

  • Craggy Island Revisited
    © Doctrine and Life 2000
    Irish Catholics can benefit from the catharsis of laughter at re-runs of 'Father Ted' - acknowledging what was truly absurd about so many of the conventions of lay/clerical protocol in 'Catholic Ireland'?

  • Bishop J.S. Spong’s ‘Why Christianity must change or Die’
    Post to Vatican II website, 1999
    Why Bishop John Shelby Spong's strategy for saving Christianity is sadly mistaken.

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