After more than a decade of closed doors and legal battles, St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in New York’s Alphabet City is restored and open again for worship. Built between 1848 and 1849, St. Brigid’s, on Avenue B and Eighth Street, is among the earliest surviving works of famed architect Patrick Keely, a Tipperary native, who carved the reredos, organ case, and the … [Read more...] about St. Brigid’s Catholic Church in the East Village Reopens
Religion
The Fight to Save Chicago's St. James Parish
Parishioners and friends of historic St. James Parish, founded in 1855 on Chicago’s South Side by Irish immigrants who’d escaped the Great Starvation, spent Easter in a prayer vigil in front of their padlocked church, imploring the Archdiocese (and the Pope, via his Twitter @Pontifex) to stop the wrecking ball, due in only a few days, from destroying their unique church and … [Read more...] about The Fight to Save Chicago's St. James Parish
The Fight to Save Chicago’s St. James Parish
Parishioners and friends of historic St. James Parish, founded in 1855 on Chicago’s South Side by Irish immigrants who’d escaped the Great Starvation, spent Easter in a prayer vigil in front of their padlocked church, imploring the Archdiocese (and the Pope, via his Twitter @Pontifex) to stop the wrecking ball, due in only a few days, from destroying their unique church and … [Read more...] about The Fight to Save Chicago’s St. James Parish
Sláinte! Mother Earth
Edythe Preet writes of the many reasons why Ireland is called the Motherland. Civilization began when hunter-gatherers learned to cultivate grain and evolved into permanent agricultural communities. Since males were the hunters and females the gatherers, anthropologists theorize it was most likely women who realized that grain grew from gathered seeds that could be … [Read more...] about Sláinte! Mother Earth
Sláinte! Forty Shades of Red
Brigid – Ireland’s red-haired saint – was one of history’s liberated women. Everyone knows that in Ireland one will encounter “forty shades of green.” Lesser realized is that another band of the spectrum also occurs in a multitude of hues: Red. While the former abounds in the lush verdant landscape, the latter crowns the heads of more than 420,000 Irish men, women and … [Read more...] about Sláinte! Forty Shades of Red