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   Judeo-Christianity is rapidly declining and is no longer the dominant Western cultural metanarrative. This long-standing worldview is being eroded through encounters with naturalism, reductionism, rapid technological advances, and an increasingly prevalent cultural mythos of progress without limitations.

2. Given that this religious worldview had unifying effects and provided much of the foundation for the West’s liberalism, a suitable alternative must be found to support our traditions of freedom, human dignity, and humane culture.
3. Unfortunately, much of current Western intellectual life has been dominated by postmodernism and its skepticism concerning metanarratives and realism.
4. The result is amythia and increasing nihilism. In essence, the West is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality. Our culture is rejecting an organic view of humanity as embedded and interconnected in nature and instead is embracing forms of transhumanism and the destructive ideologies of the Machine.
5. The cultural and human damage can be easily seen in the mental health pandemic, the meaning crisis, mass shootings, the drug epidemic, shallow consumerism, and the ongoing destruction of the environment.
6. We cannot return to metanarratives rooted in supernaturalism which have been mortally wounded by Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God and by the influences of naturalism, reductionism, and postmodernism.
7. The challenge, therefore, is to take up what Thomas Berry called The Great Work and restore an organic worldview in which humanity is seen not as an addendum or intrusion into nature but quintessentially integral within nature itself.
8. This organic vision will be informed by a new metanarrative nourished by evidence-based reasoning and insights from blending metamodernism, emergentism, and a spirituality informed by liberal naturalism.
9. Such an alternative may provide Western culture a unifying, constructive metanarrative of emergent evolution and a subsequent spirituality based in compassion, solidarity, participation, and sustainable living.
10. And the above metanarrative can support a new spiritual paradigm crafted by the best of human religious imagination, mythopoesis, ritual creation, storytelling, poetry, and artistic expression. Such a spiritual paradigm can empower a vigorous defense of human dignity that opposes the dehumanizing forces of materialism, reductionism, and nihilism.
11. Current expressions of this spiritual approach include spiritual ecology, varieties of Celtic spirituality, Emergentism, Gaianism, spiritual naturalism and religious naturalism. It still may be possible to revision Judeo-Christianity along metamodern, emergent, and liberal naturalist lines. However, Christianity is so soaked in supernaturalism and bad theology and practice, that it may be practically impossible for that revisioning to be successful. 

Western culture has also undergone revolutionary changes in its understanding of human sexuality. While most of these changes are positive, there remain lingering unintended consequences and the subsequent cultural upheavals need to be addressed.

Contraception, feminism, gay rights, and same-sex marriage, the reconfiguration of sexual morality around consent as the central principle, increased awareness of the interplay of gender and culture, and growing awareness of transsexuality have radically altered our understanding and practice of romance, sexual relationships, marriage, family, and monogamy, as well as gender itself. 

However, given that human sexuality is the means for the survival of our species as well as the impetus for much of human creativity and drive, our sexual self-understanding must be aligned with accurate visions of human nature itself in order not to be destructive.

Therefore, the task before us is a holistic analysing of human sexuality from the perspective of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and evolutionary theory, as well as an understanding of the complex relationship between culture and sexuality, which, in turn, yields insights into broader cultural forces and trends.

Modern Ireland is, in many ways, a microcosm of Western culture itself. Irish identity and meaning have rapidly changed in a period of fewer than 100 years and has tracked the same trajectory of the West overall. 

To understand the ideas at the heart of the current upheaval in Western culture, one may analyse the ideas and forces that led to the creation of the Irish Republic, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and Ireland’s integration into the technological economy and the European Union.

Studying these changes requires immersion in Irish news, politics, commentary, intellectual circles, spiritual movements, and the arts communities.

Understanding Ireland today is to understand the West today.