Sir, - Thanks to Kathryn Holmquist for her thoughtful article on post-modern Irish culture (Weekend, July 13th).
Superficiality is still the name of the game here. This was neatly reflected last week when the Taoiseach did not attend the Dáil debate on Ansbacher but, the following day, met the FAI to discuss soccer on television.
Ireland's most popular politician clearly has his finger on our superficial pulse.
We may desire something new under the sun but we may not need it to find real soul. Two millennia ago a Galilean carpenter looked at a crowd of Jewish peasants and told them they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world. He was proven right.
They and their successors challenged the religious and secular cultures of their day by being a counter-culture, by living a better way. Eventually they changed their world. Their only weapon was their faith in the carpenter.
Five centuries later, groups of Irish men and women with the same faith did the same thing in Europe, and achieved the same results. Sadly, their legacy became an institutionalised monolith that sold its soul for power. But who knows?
Perhaps the scandals of recent years in the established church, coupled with soullessness of the secular alternative, may open the door for a return of that third way.
It's not soul-soothing we need, but soul-transformation. - Yours, etc.,
SEAN MULLAN, Castlefield Park, Dublin 15.