Dean of Ossory
Kilkenny, Ireland
Joined June 2024
- Tweets125
- Following356
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Stephen Farrell retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
Stephen Farrell retweeted
Spent a day at the Four Courts in Dublin, in awe of the many forms of the common law that the Irish have preserved. Wdym you still have affidavits? A Chancery list? Motions court where you can jump the queue with an application for habeas corpus?
Stephen Farrell retweeted
Brighten a weary priest’s day. 🌞
Tell me one thing you love about the Church of England (or a church in the wider communion).
My one thing is that the cure of souls extends to every parishioner, regardless of faith, belief (or lack) or piety.
Stephen Farrell retweeted
In recent weeks locals and visitors have been drawn to a unique exhibition at St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny and we went there to hear the story behind the Peace Dove Project on #RTENationwide Friday 25th September @RTEOne 7pm @KKPeopleNews @KilkennyHour @infocathedral @rte RT
This would be an excellent innovation @churchofireland General Synod. Obviously the top hat would need a rosette and cords for a prelate.
Did you know that until 1998, if a Member of Parliament wanted to make a Point Of Order, they had to wear a top hat.
The Speaker would not hear them unless they were wearing the 'talking hat'.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Wearing a hat while sitting down was only required when raising a point of order during a division vote. During ordinary proceedings, an MP would raise a point of order by standing up without a hat. The House kept top hats available just for this tradition.
Source (pages 5/8):
parliament.uk/globalassets/d…
Stephen Farrell retweeted
Christopher Olah, a Canadian billionaire businessman and researcher who co-founded AI giant Anthropic, sitting in the Synodal Hall and speaking next to Pope Leo said, closing his speech:
"I'd like to close with a request.
We need more of the world - religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments - to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction.
We need informed critics who will tell the labs when
we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.
Today is just the beginning - the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.
Today is a powerful illustration of the form this global project of good will might take.
Let it also be a decisive first step toward a hopeful future for magnificent humanity."
Stephen Farrell retweeted
This is interesting - a legal ruling that the Green Man is a Christian symbol by the consistory court of the Diocese of Gloucester, made in October 2025 lawandreligionuk.com/wp-cont…
Stephen Farrell retweeted
Why did the CofE call its prayer app ‘Daily Prayer’ when ‘Click and Collect’ was right there?
Stephen Farrell retweeted
In December, 2018, while visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, David Kenny became hypnotized by an epitaph. Near the south door, he gazed up at a marble plaque bearing the epitaph for Jonathan Swift, the redoubtable novelist, poet, satirist, and former Dean of St. Patrick’s who died in 1745, and who was buried beneath the cathedral floor.
The text of the monument was in Latin and stipulated by Swift himself, in his will. Translations vary, but the most enduring was published in 1933, by William Butler Yeats:
SWIFT has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
Kenny had read Swift’s epitaph before, but on that day the lines caught him anew. “I had the strongest sense that there was something going on here that I couldn’t quite understand, and that wasn’t captured by Yeats,” Kenny told Ed Caesar. “The interpretive materials in the cathedral didn’t suggest the possibility of any other reading. The rousing, earnest interpretation taken up by Yeats was clearly the accepted understanding. But, to my ear, it was discordant. . . . Swift had never struck me as boastful. Something felt wrong.”
After seven years of research, Kenny thinks he’s cracked Swift’s true meaning: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/CG…
Stephen Farrell retweeted
Christ is risen! Alleluia.
The Risen Christ stands beside you, calling your name and inviting you into the resurrection life.
Stephen Farrell retweeted
We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That's us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.
ALT A full disk image of Earth, as seen from the Orion capsule. The planet is a pale blue, swirling with white clouds and glowing slightly lighter blue in place from reflected light. From about 8 to 9 o'clock, a large brown landmass is Africa, with the Iberian peninsula twinkling with lights just where the planet curves. At the 1 o'clock spot, aurora glow in a thin green glow, just barely separated from the planet's surface. Earth is set against the black of space. Credit: NASA/Reid Weisman
Stephen Farrell retweeted
“Had he died in a more merciful, less deliberately dehumanising way, it would not be possible to see in his death the sum of all horrors.”
@flemingrut on the theological implications of the fact that Jesus was not just executed, but crucified.
Stephen Farrell retweeted
Nothing--I think I mean that literally--compares with Holy Week to ground the Christian. Faithful attendance each day at some sort of gathering, however simple, however poorly attended, will make it work. Each day, with its appointed readings, is a dose of unfiltered gospel.
Stephen Farrell retweeted
Palm Sunday. To my mind, it's the day that has it all, so to speak--triumph and panoply in the first part of the service with everybody on their feet singing "All glory, laud, and honor," then the full Passion narrative, then "Ah Holy Jesus" and absolute silence at the end.
Stephen Farrell retweeted
In this month’s editorial, the Editor, @ClarkBrydon, reflects candidly on the financial realities facing the Gazette — and why a genuinely independent Church paper cannot rely on central funding alone. Independence matters, but it comes at a cost.
coigazette.ie/the-cost-of-in…
It may have been intended for another, but I’m claiming this Laphroaig to join with colleagues of the #clergymaltclub
