Sadistic. Sectarian. Barbaric. Savage. Bloodthirsty. These and many other similar words have been used recently throughout the media reporting on the current situation in the Middle East. Human nature is showing its ugly side in a dreadful and direct manner. To make it even worse, it’s all being done in the name of God and his Will by people with…

A few weeks ago, on Trinity Sunday, in my sermon I used a comparison of multiple identities of myself to illustrate that aspect of our faith: one God in three Persons. When I was delivering that sermon at Masses, I realised that some people might have read that as my stance regarding the referendum on Scottish independence – which was…

For the last two Sundays, some of you spotted two unfamiliar boys serving at Mass. They came here with their parents, friends of mine, and the whole family visited Scotland for the first time. They hadn’t known much about the people living here so they had had some mildly stereotypical views of Scots and of the country. But once they…

Recent weeks in particular have shown us how short the media’s attention span is. Any time a new story has appeared, the previous one has been virtually abandoned. The war in Syria, that once dominated the TV screens and front pages, was replaced by the turmoil in Ukraine, which was then replaced by the takeover of swathes of Iraq by…

Three friends were stuck on a desert island for a long time, until one day they found a magic lamp. They rubbed the lamp hard, and out popped a genie. The genie said that he could only give three wishes: so, since there were three men, each man would get one wish. The first one went: “I hate it here.…