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4. Talking 'Crisis' with Sister Maeve McMahon
44:30||Season 2020, Ep. 4Sister Maeve McMahon, a Dominican religious sister and an award winning author, joins me to talk about lockdown - about how ordinary people can learn to deal with life becoming so small and limited in this global crisis. She has been here before. In 2005 Sister Maeve was in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, affecting the lives of thousands of people and claiming the lives of almost two thousand people. Maeve, a dear and wonderful friend, shares what she learned then and since that we might take from it something that just might help us to cope a little better in this awful crisis.
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3. In Conversation with Claire Carroll
38:27||Season 2020, Ep. 3The Curious Incident of the Fairy Tree in Tallaght: Claire Carroll is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible at DCU in Dublin and is currently finishing her PhD on the Book of Jeremiah. She recently discovered that people in her community, in the midst of social distancing and government mandated restrictions to help deal of the COVID-19 crisis, had started making a 'fairy tree' in her local park. In this episode we discuss why we think people have starting doing these little rituals, and asking if this is a sign of spontaneous religiosity or just a local craft project.
2. The Day is Almost Over
08:18||Season 2020, Ep. 2Right now, we are in the midst of a very strange kind of Eucharistic fast. The bishops have encouraged the people not to come to Mass, to stay at home and stay safe from a terrible virus that is taking lives all over the world. Older people are cocooning and shielding. Being more at risk from the coronavirus than the young, they are staying in their homes, relying on the kindness of family and friends for their shopping, their banking, and all the other things they need done. Sick people – people with various types of cancer and lung conditions for example – are doing the same. Those of us who are younger and healthier have been asked by the government to remain at home as much as possible, to refrain from unnecessary trips out of doors to help curb the spread of the virus; thus, helping to protect those who are more vulnerable.
1. Unless I See
08:30||Season 2020, Ep. 1Second Sunday of Easter (19 April 2020) It is perhaps true to say that we, in the developed world, are living at a time which might accurately be described as the twilight of faith. At the start of the twentieth century, between the wholesale slaughter of the Great War and the unimaginable evil of the Holocaust, in the first few decades of a century marked and marred by global conflict and murder and genocide on an industrial scale, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche brought the anxiety of his age and the great fin de siècle debate between science and religion to certain unavoidable conclusions; that the entire moral structure built around faith was meaningless precisely because its foundations – the belief in God – was, at best, mere superstition.