Today, two rivers run silently though London, one is called the River Thames, the other is known by another name: fear. The coronavirus has come amongst us. Its arrival was gradual at first. Via news reports of surreal events in far-off places it seemed to drift towards the city before suddenly striking. Panic was its … Read more
On the weekend of February 8, 2020, a storm ripped through Ireland. Storm Ciara was one of the worst of its kind for many years. Its winds, snows, and driving rains caused havoc with landslides and flooding. At the same time, a political storm ripped through the Irish political landscape. Sinn Féin up-ended the political … Read more
Overroads is marked down for demolition. Last year, the owners of the former home of G.K. Chesterton and his wife, Frances, put the house on the market with an asking price of £1.9 million pounds (about $2.4 million dollars). They found no buyers, and so turned to property developers. These, in turn, applied to the … Read more
In case you haven’t noticed, the United Kingdom is going through a collective political meltdown. The 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union proved to be the pulled thread that is unraveling the seemingly seamless garment of the British constitution. Now as the shrewd observer will know, unlike the U.S. Constitution, the British … Read more
Seventy years ago in June 1949 George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. On June 7, 2019, the day prior to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s 70th anniversary, The Guardian, the United Kingdom’s leading socialist newspaper, announced: “Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses to describe abortion bans.” What follows in this pronouncement would have … Read more
On February 22, 2019, The Irish Times reported that “a four-year-old child, who was found to have been injured at 20 weeks’ gestation, is to receive €45,000 damages for personal injury arising from an accident in a [supermarket] store.” The Irish Times went on to report that the judge declared that the injury of an … Read more
The latest statistics for abortions in the United Kingdom have been made public by the Department of Health. The revised abortion figures released just days prior to Christmas show that in 2017 the numbers of UK abortions were at a ten-year high. The figures also unveil Britain’s culture of death and the money being made … Read more
Fr. George Rutler needs little by way of introduction to Crisis readers. He has been gracing its pages, first in print and then online, for just shy of four decades. Recently, Crisis caught up with Fr. Rutler for an interview on his life as a priest-writer to mark the publication of his latest collection of writings. … Read more
The film series Brain, Heart, World has just been released. It consists of three episodes each about 30 minutes long. Each episode explores a different realm in which pornography causes harm: the individual, human relationships, and society as a whole. There are some depressing facts to be learned from Brain, Heart, World. For a start, … Read more
A new documentary, The Creepy Line, suggests that Google is not living up to its primary motto: “Don’t be Evil.” Instead, it is involved in activities that should be viewed with some concern by anyone who values privacy and freedom of speech. Some facts from the film: Google tracks your location history and keeps a … Read more
Unlike Waugh, Greene, and Tolkien, David Jones is not a name cited by many Catholics interested in the Catholic literary renaissance of the twentieth century. It is a pity, not only because of Jones’s literary and artistic triumphs of the middle part of the century but also because this multi-talented polymath was a devout Catholic … Read more
Press reports last summer suggested that the French have rediscovered the devil. Across the Channel there appeared to be at large a variety of “do-it-yourself exorcisms” taking place, alongside a growing band of free market—and unofficial—exorcists who, according to The Times, were advertising their services to the French public at a price, for example, to … Read more
The French film L’Apparition appears on cinema screens this weekend. It is the story of an investigative journalist and a young woman who is allegedly having visions of the Virgin Mary. It is a movie that explores belief and skepticism more than faith, however. The film’s main character is Jacques Mayano (Vincent Lindon). He is … Read more
At a time when there are persistent rumors emanating from the Vatican of a “revision” of Humanae Vitae, there comes a film showing why fifty years on the 1968 encyclical and what it teaches needs greater proclamation not revision. Unprotected: A Pope, the Pill, and the Perils of Sexual Chaos is a new film produced … Read more
There has been much ink spilt over the recent referendum result in Ireland. Analysis of the reasons as to why the vote was lost may, however, provide seeds for a strategy to win similar debates in the future. For the first time in Irish politics, the former fault lines of Irish politics—anti versus pro-British, Protestant versus … Read more
With the Irish abortion referendum over, a new front opens for the abortion lobby: Northern Ireland. On June 5, 2018, the British House of Commons had an emergency debate on the issue of abortion provision in Northern Ireland. As it did so, however, it became clear that there is a bigger picture emerging that the … Read more
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned… Almost one hundred years ago the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming. It is a strange nightmarish poem. It tells of events that are both seen … Read more
To most of Britain’s Catholic population, Jacob Rees-Mogg is, to say the least, a curious figure. Unlike many Catholic Parliamentarians, not only does Rees-Mogg say he is a Catholic but he votes in Parliament the way a Catholic should on certain—non-negotiable—issues. Furthermore, he is quite happy to tell the world this, and, refreshingly, without apology … Read more
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land… April 23 is St. George’s Day, the national feast day of England. On April 23, 2018 three events occurred. Ealing Council in west London became the first English Local Authority to implement a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) for the area around a … Read more
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” ∼ Frankenstein, Ch. 10 In January 2018, the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos received the following message on the threat posed by Artificial Life: Artificial intelligence, robotics and other technological innovations must be so employed that they contribute to the service of … Read more