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The N word
I’m from the North. When I moved to go to college, I had to modify my accent – otherwise some people wouldn’t have understood a word I said. I later discovered that my hometown (Strabane) had been judged (by Channel 4) to be the third worst place to live in the United Kingdom. This past… Read more
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One another
In his book Hillbilly Elegy[1] J.D. Vance gives an insight into his family’s roots in the Appalachian culture of rural Kentucky. To get the story told, he writes in their home-spun expletive-laden vernacular. It’s obvious that he loves them fiercely. After recounting his extended family’s difficulties in personal and heart-wrenching detail, Vance turns to the… Read more
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‘I find it too very ugly’: The statue so divisive it was hidden in a Dún Laoghaire garden
Rite & Reason: I keep meeting people who tell me that, no matter how hard they look, they can’t see resurrection anywhere in the statue David Wilson Dún Laoghaire has long been proud of nudging the national interest towards the meaning of life. It did this in the 20th century through its artists, writers and poets.… Read more
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Jesus and Marx
My attention was arrested by the title of a book published last year: ‘Living a Marxist Life: Why Marx is a Drug You Should Probably Take’ [1] This continues the mesmeric attraction of Karl Marx that has been renewed, especially since his 200th birthday in 2018. This summer, Yanis Varoufakis the former Greek finance minister,… Read more
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Why you don’t want to be just a New Testament Christian
The Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio – National Gallery, London Foolish disciples After Easter this year I was pulled up short by reading the passage in the Gospel of Luke chapter 24, which we fondly call ‘The Two on the Road to Emmaus’, despite the fact that there were obviously three of them. What caught… Read more
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How to check if you’re a migrant
I think I’m a migrant. Seriously. You might be too. It’s worth checking. The idea was first put into my head by no less than the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. He was addressing a seminar on ‘New Testament metaphors for the church’. The meeting had already considered metaphors like ‘the body of Christ’… Read more
the electrician's children 