Edmund Rice International

Two big schools, St Patrick’s and St Vincent’s, and a trades-training centre, are now embedded in two eco-parks, thanks to the work of Brother Frank Gale, many young men training to be Brothers, and the local staff and students. Ponds, trees, a vigorous undergrowth, and wildlife give a glimpse of the local ecosystem that almost [...]

Kurseong, at the far north end of West Bengal, clings to the steep slopes where the Himalayas rise from the plains of the Ganga. In the rainy season, one falls to sleep here to the sounds of pouring water, as the white streams rush down their narrow gullies. Goethals Memorial High School, a boys boarding [...]

Sunflowers and ground-nuts (peanuts, to some of us), still waiting for the rains in their sandy furrows, have brought an economic boom to Challakere. Surrounded by villages where people are totally engrossed in surviving, Challakere now has mills that produce cooking oils from these crops, and some steady employment. The Brothers have been here for [...]

I attended the Human Rights Council session on “Human Rights and Climate Change” recently. The session took the form of a short input from a range of experts on different aspects of the issue and was followed by responses and questions from representatives of member states of the UN. I was struck by how much [...]

At the bottom of the United States, New Orleans is perched uneasily on the coils of the Mississippi, in its final meandering into the Gulf of Mexico. The relationship between the river and the town dominated our week there. The Christian Brothers went to New Orleans because, they say, “That’s where Edmund Rice would be [...]

Saturday morning tends to be a little less stressful than the rest of the week. I get to stay in bed a little longer. Promptly at 7.00am my radio tunes in to the weekly France Culture; eco-magazine. It is called Terre à Terre, introduced by theme music that is a blending of earth sounds with [...]

I was walking through rolling vistas of rusty bracken and purple heather, on Dartmoor, with an unlikely straggle of lawyers and others. We’d just left Grimspound, the 4,000 year old Neolithic settlement, and were heading towards the medieval village of Widecomb-in-the-Moor. Our topic was Earth Jurisprudence – Does Earth have rights? Can human laws protect [...]

Oceania is more a state of mind than a place. It is what six former provinces of Christian Brothers are aspiring to become, a complex of islands and oceans, between Asia, Africa and the Americas. Note the stress on oceans (chaos) and remember the first creation story in our Jewish-Christian scriptures. It is that new! [...]