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Identity and its discontents
I’ve been thinking about what we mean when we talk about identity and ‘identity politics’. It needs thinking about because it’s a muddled conversation: identity has more than one meaning yet the label...
View ArticleBe merry, god damn it!
Well Baby Jesus’s Pretend Birthday is over for another year, so now that everyone is busy scrubbing gravy stains off the ceiling and wrapping up the leftover spam and chestnut pie for the week’s...
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What Jesus never told Caesar
Jerry Falwell Junior, son of the more famous religious fanatic of the same name, tweeted a profound religious thought a couple of days ago. Jesus said love our neighbors as ourselves but never told...
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Most eminent citizens
The American evangelical preacher and publicity hound Billy Graham died last week age 99. Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune reported, people were lining up to ‘pay their final respects to a man who...
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Hell: real or fake?
Barry has already reported on the recurring story of “the pope says there is no hell … or does he?” but I want to point out some Profound Theological Questions the issue raises. Let’s start with the...
View ArticleRemoved in the dead of night
Back in October 2016, a US group that monitors far-right hate groups – think KKK and similar racist fomenters of violence – issued a new report/field guide on what it called ‘anti-Muslim public...
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A landslide!
Amnesty UK on the facts about abortion in Ireland before the vote to repeal the 8th amendment (convert all verbs to the past tense): Any woman who has an abortion in Ireland faces up to 14 years in...
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Closer to the edge
We in the US lurched some big steps closer to full-on authoritarianism and even fascism this week (as we do most weeks). Am I sure we’ll end up there? No, but nor am I confident we won’t. We’re...
View ArticleSpeaking whale backwards
Let’s take a look at Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop (her company) and ‘wellness’. What is wellness, you may ask? You’d think it would be just the obverse of sickness, but apparently it’s much more than that...
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The standards of the day
Since the Pope’s weekend in Ireland is in the news, including here, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a peek into Ireland’s history with the Catholic church. We could look in many places; we...
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