The New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens has been warmly received in Ireland. Yet still the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage draws tens of thousands of people up a mountain on one day every year. So something of our old thinking is still with us.

In Empty Pulpits, author Malachi O'Doherty argues that our Irish experience has news for the fundamentalists, who think nothing ever changes, but also for the hard atheists, who don't understand religious culture from the inside. Ireland is on the cusp between faith and atheism, free now to think freshly about both.