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Articles

Christ-Haunted Sally Rooney
I grew up in Ireland in the 1970s and eighties. The parents of my friends, neighbors, cousins, classmates, and so on, mostly had intact marriages; only a tiny number were separated or divorced.

Guerrilla Culture War
The War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its Historyby frank furedipolity, 240 pages, $29.95 About halfway through Frank Furedi’s The War Against the Past, the...
Localism: Our Last Best Hope?
Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teachingedited by dale ahlquist and michael warren davisrnsophia institute press, 240 pages, $21.95 How often do politicians talk about love of country? I...
“Uncivilized” Catholic Ireland
Neil Jordan is Ireland’s greatest and most successful film director. His 1992 movie The Crying Game was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay, which Jordan won. Michael...
Ireland Tries and Fails to Erase Mothers
The people of Ireland have voted resoundingly not to remove the word “mother” from the Irish Constitution. This week, the results of a double referendum were announced. The first...
The Fall of the Irish Mammy
Ireland is holding a referendum on March 8—International Women’s Day—which, if the governing parties have their way, will mean the word “mother” is removed from Bunreacht na hÉireann, the...
C. S. Lewis, Eamon Duffy, and the Medieval Spirit
It is sixty years since the posthumous publication of The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis. (Its author had died in November 1963, on the same day as John...
Ireland Drained of Religion
Prophet Songby paul lynchoneworld, 320 pages, $30.28 In the U.K. and Ireland, no literary award is greeted with as much fanfare and public interest as the Booker Prize. The...
Irish Catholics on the World Stage
The assassination of John F. Kennedy sixty years ago in Dallas is remembered in large part for all of the things it is reputed to have shattered: postwar American...
Calling Western Civilization to Its Senses
The venue for the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, held Oct. 30–Nov. 1 in London, was emphatically not what I was expecting. ARC was established earlier...
Grace at Electric Picnic
Electric Picnic is Ireland’s biggest annual music festival. It has come to occupy a place in the national calendar similar to that of the Glastonbury Festival in the United...
Dublin’s Dilemma
In the prologue to his acclaimed book The Best Catholics in the World, Derek Scally observes the mood in Dublin when Pope Francis said Mass in Phoenix Park in...
Sally Rooney’s Catholic Millennials
Recently, while reading Sally Rooney’s hugely acclaimed novels for the first time, I messaged a friend to say how bleak I was finding them. He replied that his impression of...
National Conservatism Comes to the U.K.
On the sixth of May, Charles III was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey. His sister and two brothers, their spouses, and their children looked on, as did...
Heroic Historian
Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great Warby joseph t. stuartcatholic university of america, 448 pages, $29.95 Joseph T. Stuart’s book holds out the promise...