The Iona Institute ~ for Religion and Society
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The Iona Blog
Opinions contained in The Iona Blog are not necessarily those of The Iona Institute. The Iona Blog is open to anyone who broadly shares the views of The Iona Institute. If you wish to post a comment on a relevant topic please email 200 – 400 words to info@ionainstitute.ie and it will be considered for inclusion in the blog.
‘Child citizens’ of the New Irish Republic
~Tom Hickey, a PhD student from NUI Galway, has written the most extraordinary article on school patronage for The Irish Times today in which he repeatedly refers not to children, but to ‘child citizens’. Read more...
The public still believes in the value of fatherhood, but...
~A new poll from the prestigious Pew Research Centre issued to coincide with Father’s Day, shows that 70 percent of Americans believe women having children without a dad to help raise them is bad for society. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron would agree. Read more...
Accepting ‘tolerance’ or else, argues legal academic
~Writing in The Irish Times yesterday, law lecturer Ronan McCrea argued that immigrant laws must give preference to people who are committed to ‘tolerance’. Depending on what he means, this could be deeply problematic, or not. Read more...
Divorce and the war of all against all
~Study after study has been produced showing the negative effects of divorce on children. But even when the children of divorce manage to keep up their school grades and so on, divorce can still affect them in ways that are not directly measurable. I came across a very relevant quote on this point the other day from the philosopher Allan Bloom. Read more...
Defenders of the Swedish day-care system completely miss the point
~At our conference on Women, Home and Work a fortnight ago, speaker Jonas Himmelstrand said the Swedish day-care model should not be followed by other countries because it is failing both children and parents in his country. Read more...
‘Liberating’ mothers from their motherhood instincts
~As mentioned in my previous blog on the topic, at the recent Iona Institute conference, I was shocked by some of Jonas Himmelstrand's descriptions of family policy in Sweden. As I understood, it aimed, among other things, to "liberate mothers from motherhood instincts," so they could continue their careers. Read more...
Sticks and carrots to promote dual income families
~At the Iona Institute’s family policy conference late last month, we heard Jonas Himmelstrand’s sometimes jaw-dropping description of Swedish family policy. It was interesting to hear, on the one hand, how government policy and media so strongly promote the Swedish model of full-time daycare and full employment for parents as early as the child's second year. Read more...
Ten years of same-sex marriage in the Netherlands
~Here is a research brief produced by US think-tank, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (iMAPP) on the 10th anniversary of same-sex marriage in the Netherlands and the overall state of marriage there. It provides some food for thought on the possible impact of legalising same-sex marriage on the institution of marriage generally. Read more...
Is it is boy, is it a girl? We're not going to tell you.
~As you may have read, a Canadian couple is not telling the world the sex of their baby. To do so, they believe, would impose all kinds of stereotypes about boys and girls on the child. Read more...
The emotional baggage of some of secularism’s leading lights
~I have recently finished reading Victoria White’s book Mother Ireland – why Ireland hates motherhood (which was referred to at the Institute’s conference last week on Women, Home and Work). Read more...
Sweden's semi-compulsory day-care system
~In today's Irish Times Breda O'Brien summarises proceedings at our conference this week on women, home and work concentrating in particular on what Jonas Himmelstrand had to say about day-care in Sweden. Read more...
Miliband misses the point on marriage
~Labour leader Ed Miliband (pictured) is set to marry on Friday, but it seems he doesn't want it to be an advert for the institution of marriage. Instead, he told the BBC that marriage does not ‘automatically’ make families more stable. Read more...
Catholic schools and Mass attendance - why the disparity?
~Fr Micheál Mac Gréil's new book, ‘Pluralism and Diversity in Ireland’, has some interesting findings as regards religious practice in Ireland. Perhaps one of the most interesting points he makes is that only 38.7pc of of Catholics who report having completed secondary schooling attend weekly Mass. Read more...
How the Swedish utopia intimidates families
~Secular liberal commentators often point to Sweden as a country where their ideal of an equitable, modern, secular and tolerant country actually works. However, the flip side of Sweden's hyper-egalitarianism is that the State has made Swedish families extremely subservient to it. And a recent case has highlighted just how illiberal this intervention can be. Read more...
On single parents, fathers and Barack Obama
~Karen Kiernan, the director of One Family, a single parent support group, had a letter in yesterday's Irish Times, praising an article in that paper on the “love and determination shown by President Obama’s single mother”. Read more...
How to destroy the institutions of marriage and private property
~In a recent article posted on the Public Discourse website, Christopher Wolfe, emeritus professor of political science at Marquette University, draws an interesting analogy between marriage as a social institution and private property as a social institution. Read more...
A very bleak view of marriage and personal relationships
~Earlier this week, British Prime Minister David Cameron was attacked by the Centre for Social Justice over his failure to support marriage and the family since coming into office a year ago. The irony is that the CSJ was founded by one of his own Ministers, Iain Duncan Smith. Read more...
Pharmacist has windows smashed for standing by his conscience
~I didn’t spot this story at the time, but it is absolutely extraordinary. As we know, some pharmacists object to selling the so-called morning-after-pill because it can act as an abortifacient. But in Berlin recently, a pharmacy had its windows smashed because of the owner’s refusal to sell the morning-after-pill. Read more...
Newsflash: most school-age teenagers aren’t having sex
~MP Nadine Dorries has bravely proposed a new law requiring that schools teaching abstinence education to girls aged 13-16. I say brave, because there is something about the word ‘abstinence’ that makes some people break out in spots. She would have been better off using a term like ‘sexual delay’. Read more...
Marriage of Will and Kate a teaching moment
~The marriage of Kate Middleton to Prince William last Friday was a teaching moment par excellence. The Church of England used it to full advantage to gently teach about the nature of marriage, and the message was very traditional. Read more...
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