During the campaign to repeal Ireland’s protections for the unborn, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar pledged that abortion would become “safe, legal and rare”. Yet in the years since the 2018 repeal of the eighth amendment, over 28,000 abortions have already been carried out.
Campaigners for so-called ‘assisted dying’ want to enable terminally ill adults to get help to end their lives.
The term ‘hate crime’ has become embedded in the public consciousness over the last few years.
The Government intends to ban ‘conversion therapy’. A new law covering both sexual orientation and gender identity is being drafted, overseen by Equalities Minister Roderic O’Gorman TD.
Increasingly in our culture, the individual experience of those deemed to be ‘oppressed’ settles every argument and overrides objective evidence. Their perception is seen as all important. An ‘oppressed’ person’s feelings cannot be questioned. Feelings are more important than facts. (6 pages)
‘Critical Theory’ is the ideology behind woke activism and ‘cancel culture’. Both Christians and non-Christians are facing fierce challenges at university or at work because of this lethal blend of postmodernism and Marxism. (48 pages)
Only a few decades ago, a high view of the Lord’s Day was standard among English-speaking evangelicals. Yet today, there are many Christians for whom the whole notion of one day set aside for God seems a quaint throw-back to Victorian values. It is easy to feel intimidated by the tide of this popular thinking within the evangelical world.
We have come to think of humanism as something to oppose. Secular humanism represents what most Christians view as the advance of the secular state: policy proposals and decisions which are based upon the centrality and priority of human reason or rationality without reference to God at all, never mind any basis in the revelation given in Holy Scripture.
The Tron Church Glasgow took the Institute’s recent Gnosticism publication, written by Dr Nick Needham, as its ‘Big Read’. As they discuss the booklet, Agnes Brough, Phil Copeland and Willie Philip seek to help Christians be better equipped to have informed conversations on such sensitive and difficult topics.
The Scottish Government has promised a public consultation on conversion therapy legislation covering both sexual orientation and gender identity by the end of 2023. It had previously committed to publish a Bill by this date.