In November 2013, the campaign group Abortion Rights announced their first-ever student conference. It was, they explained, in response to ‘many student unions reporting increased anti-choice activity on campuses’. Societies such as Oxford Students for Life, which I’ve been part of for the last couple of years, don’t tend to think of themselves as ‘anti-choice’, Read more
How low can society go? When one considers the many ways countless human beings are treated like cheap disposable products – from children exploited by pornographers, to young sweatshop workers exploited by wealthy corporations – it’s hard to imagine how much worse it can get for the poor and vulnerable. But dismembering and vacuuming babies Read more
The other day there was an item on CathNews expressing dismay and anger by anti-poverty campaigners, at hundreds of tonnes of food being destroyed by the order of Vladimir Putin. This is much less than half the story and the other side needs to be aired also. When Western nations impose sanctions on other nations, Read more
It is often the case that global events are best understood when viewed through the prism of the individual lives caught up in them. With the coming of the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, the life of Takashi Nagai, as told in Fr. Paul Glynn’s A Song for Nagasaki (Ignatius Press, 2009), does Read more
In preparation for the XIV Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in October 2015, Pope Francis has encouraged bishops around the world to undertake wide consultation on the topic ‘The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and Contemporary World’. The New Zealand Conference of Bishops invited people to add their Read more
As I was writing last week, my wife’s mother was dying. She died Sunday morning, at 95, after a long and full life. It was a good death, to use an unfortunately old-fashioned phrase, but death is still death. One effect, as many of you will understand, is to make me think more about death Read more
About twelve years ago, I was at an Auckland Literary Festival, with a talk on ‘The Influences that Have Made a Writer.’ The greatest influence in my life, my faith, I left until last, aware that some people were allergic to talk about religion. I said if anyone wanted to leave at that point, I Read more
I got on to the train late on Friday evening a few weeks ago, the day after Laudato Si’ had been released. Working in Catholic media as I do, I had already had the opportunity to read it in full (I love my job!). When I stepped on to the train, I didn’t go up Read more
Porn, and the way it is shaping our individual and collective cultural mindset, has moved on dramatically since I last wrote on the subject for this title six years ago. Sexually explicit material is no longer on the fringes of our culture; it’s in the mainstream. Yet while the ‘dirty secret’ about porn is well Read more
Father George Zabelka, the Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group — the atomic bomb group — blessed the aircrews and their two missions before they set out to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seventy years ago, on August 6, 1945, the single most destructive weapon ever unleashed upon human beings and the environment – the atomic bomb – Read more