In May 2015 Pope Francis published Laudato Si’, his Encyclical Letter on Caring for our Common Home. Five years on, his appeal to every person on this planet remains as relevant. “The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and… Read more »

Asked in a briefing, in February 2002, about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the American Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, entered into a poetic reverie that unintentionally described risk. In his answer he declared: … as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know… Read more »

We tend to think that law defines what crime is. This makes sense because contemporary legal codes are concerned with marking out the territory where conduct is permissible by specifying the conduct that is outlawed. Yet the earliest bodies of law – consider for example, the Torah or Hammurabi’s Code – are at least as… Read more »

When Pope Francis met with a number of survivors of clerical abuse during his visit to Ireland in August 2018, the impact was profound. The expectations of those he met were minimal — that they would sit and listen, and he would leave after 30 minutes. Instead, the meeting went on for an hour-and-a-half and… Read more »

As a society, Ireland puts effort into remembering. Orchestrated campaigns have been launched for the “decade of commemorations,” as we mark the centenary of the decisive events, from the 1913 Lock-out to the cessation of the Civil War in 1923, that established modern Ireland. Yet right in the middle of that period, in 2018, we… Read more »

The Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures Report (2014-2020) sets out a realistic vision for the future of children and young people in Ireland. This vision is for ‘Ireland to be one of the best small countries in the world in which to grow up and raise a family, and where the rights of all children and… Read more »

When Ireland became an independent State it inherited some appallingly bad housing conditions. This was most notoriously the case in the severely deprived areas of inner-city Dublin, but inadequate and overcrowded housing which lacked basic facilities was also prevalent in towns and villages and rural areas around the country. Over the following seven decades, significant… Read more »

In February 2016, the Jesuit Secretariat for Social Justice and Ecology and for Higher Education in Rome published a Special Report on Justice in the Global Economy. The Report was compiled by an international group of Jesuits and lay colleagues in the fields of social science and economics, philosophy and theology. It understands itself as… Read more »

John Guiney SJ and Eugene Quinn During 2015, in excess of one million refugees and migrants risked their lives in crossing the Mediterranean Sea to enter the European Union. More than 3,700 people, one quarter of them children, died by drowning during the attempt. Europe’s experience of increased forced migration is just one element of… Read more »

Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home, the first papal document devoted entirely to ecology, has generated considerable interest and debate since its publication in June 2015. The encyclical is at once an exploration of the various environmental crises facing the world, a radical critique of current economic models, a call… Read more »