This book of essays will appeal to anyone interested in the dismantling of Ireland's cultural attachment to Catholicism over the past four decades.

Eugene O'Brien teaches at the University of Limerick and at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. He also works as a tutor for Oscail, the Irish distance learning project. He has published two books, The Question of Irish Identity in the Writings of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce and The Epistemology of Nationalism. He has published over twenty articles in various international academic journals. He is also the commissioning editor of a series of Irish Studies monographs entitled Ireland in Theory.

Introduction - Eamon Maher and Eugene O'Brien
Part I: Tracing change and setting the context
1. 'The times they are a changin'': Tracing the transformation of Irish Catholicism through the eyes of a journalist - Patsy McGarry
2. Revisiting the faith of our fathers ... and reimagining its relevance in the context of twenty-first-century Ireland - Louise Fuller
3. Dethroning Irish Catholicism: Church, State and modernity in contemporary Ireland - David Carroll Cochran
4. Refracted visions: Street photography, humanism and the loss of innocence - Justin Carville
5. Contemporary Irish Catholicism: A time of hope! - Vincent Twomey
Part II: Going against the tide
6. The poetry of accumulation: Irish-American fables of resistance - Eamonn Wall
7. Prophetic voices or complicit functionaries? Irish priests and the unravelling of a culture - Eamon Maher
8. Tony Flannery: A witness in an age of witnesses - Catherine Maignant
9. 'Belief shifts': Ireland's referendum and the journey from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft - Eugene O'Brien
Part III: Challenges in the here and now
10. Faith, hope and clarity? A new church for the unhoused - Michael Cronin
11. The people in the pews: Silent and betrayed - Patricia Casey
12. Irreconcilable differences? The fraught relationship between women and the Catholic Church in Ireland - Sharon Tighe-Mooney
13. The Catholic twilight - Joe Cleary
Index