What happens when you marry outside your belief system, whether that be a religious belief system or a secular belief system? The answer, frequently, is trouble as ‘Til Faith Do Us Part’, a new book by Naomi Schaefer Riley from Oxford University Press makes clear....
Last week, the Iona Institute released a report detailing the extent of marital breakdown and the proliferation of new family forms in Ireland, including a surge in the number of children raised by lone parents. Iona Institute representatives debated this issue on a number of programmes and came up against a flat-out denial that there...
Gay couple David Tutera and Ryan Jurica have gone their separate way just months after taking delivery of half-twins via a surrogate mother. Tutera is biologically the father of one child and Jurica is father of the other child. Advocates of sperm and egg donation and surrogate motherhood constantly tell us that the biological tie...
The British Social Attitudes survey, which has been running annually for 30 years now, was published yesterday and showed that, over the course of those 30 years, there has been a steep decline in the numbers who think marriage is important for raising children and those who identify as religious. The numbers aren’t really surprising....
This week The Iona Institute launched a new report called Marriage Breakdown and Family Structure in Ireland. The headline figure is that divorce and separation in Ireland has risen sixfold since 1968. As at Census 2011, almost 250,000 Irish adults were separated or divorced. I appeared on a number of shows to discuss the report...
The trend towards removing every last trace of religion from the public square continues apace across the Western world. In a blog for the Telegraph website, Brendan O’Neill (pictured) says that the hallmark of this trend is secular liberal intolerance. O’Neill, himself an atheist, writes: “If you want to see what intolerance means, look no...
This week the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ageless ‘I have a dream’ speech took place. Much of the commentary has ignored the fact that Dr King was a Baptist pastor that his vision, and his vision of justice specifically, had a deeply religious underpinning. As David Quinn argues in his column in The...
It’s interesting to read about the policy of the early Soviet state towards the family and to compare it with policies gaining increasing influence in the West today including in Ireland. They are rather too similar for comfort. Essentially, both sets of policies have the effect of making the State far more powerful and the...
Recent coverage of the crisis unfolding in Egypt has finally focused attention on the plight of Coptic Christians in that country. But, as this article by David Quinn argues, we in the West ought to be far more aware of the fate of persecuted Christians across the globe. You can read the article in full...
In an effort to be more ‘inclusive’ the Girl Guides in Britain have dropped references to ‘God’ and ‘country’ from their pledge. Guides now pledge instead to “be true to myself” and to “develop my beliefs”. This is almost beyond parody. Essentially, instead of the pledge being focussed on something external, it is now focussed...
