Moral Matters

Mark Dooley has held lectureships at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and at University College Dublin. From 2003-2006, he wrote a controversial column on foreign affairs for the Sunday Independent. Since 2006, he has written for the Irish Daily Mail. He is author of The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility (2001), The Philosophy of Derrida (2007), Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (2009) and Why Be a Catholic? (2011).

• Introduction: From loss to love1 Homesickness 2 Playing with our toys3 Dealing with the dead4 A work of love5 Fantasies of freedom6 The law of the home7 Caring for creation8 Conserving culture9 Saving the sacredConclusion: Homecoming

At the heart of Moral Matters is the idea of home; homebuilding and homecoming are Dooley’s chief motifs. Against the traditional homestead and the pastoral outlook that sustains it Dooley contrast the spiritual wasteland of “Cyberia” and its ethic of instant gratification. Cyberia, the virtual world of video games and “social networking” websites, of fast food and online shopping, is a realm of immediacy and isolation, a place where lasting attachments are shunned in favor of fleeting exchanges and superficial allegiances … Dooley ably disposes of the arguments of a variety of postmodern thinkers … Dooley has the benefit of having written on all of these philosophers from a position sympathetic to their broad postmodernist project, and his responses are not careless denunciations but subtle and penetrating critiques … as a work that unashamedly celebrates traditional values and unflinchingly faces the reality of a world where those values are everywhere imperiled, you will not find better.