More big questions - and more interesting answers - from Gay Byrne's hugely popular RTÉ TV show. We all look for meaning in our lives and here twenty well-known public figures from Ian Paisley to Ronan Keating reflect on life's big questions and share what gives their lives meaning.

More big questions – and more interesting answers – from Gay Byrne's hugely popular RTÉ TV show We all look for meaning in our lives and here twenty well-known public figures share what gives their lives meaning, prompting us to ponder the question ourselves and perhaps even find some answers. Following last year's bestselling The Meaning of Life, Gay Byrne is back with more insightful discussions on the big themes that bind us all: childhood, love, faith, disbelief, morality, religion, grief. Based on his popular and long-running RTÉ TV show, The Meaning of Life 2 explores life's big questions with an array of fascinating public figures, among them Ronan Keating, Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, Ian Paisley and Imelda May. With Peter McVerry he ponders whether life is shaped by accidents or by the way people respond to accidents. Mary Robinson reveals the beliefs and values that fuel her formidable moral engine. Eamon Dunphy's early experiences led him to believe that 'everyone is magnificent in their own way', and Edna O'Brien discusses her struggles with the Catholic Church after the infamous banning of The Country Girls. 'There are many pearls of wisdom to be harvested from the human oysters featured here who share with me the beliefs, values, thoughts and experiences that have shaped, or been shaped by, their lives.' Gay Byrne The Meaning of Life 2: Table of Contents Preface by Gay Byrne - Imelda May - Peter McVerry - Mary Robinson - Brian Cody - Ian Paisley - J. P. Donleavy - Emily O'Reilly - John Lonergan - Ronan Keating - Maureen Gaffney - Sean O'Sullivan - Christina Noble - Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh - Fionnula Flanagan - Colm Tóibín - Mary Byrne - Colm Wilkinson - Celine Byrne - Edna O'Brien - Eamon DunphyFor each book sold, a donation will be made to The Peter McVerry Trust and The Christina Noble Children's Foundation.

On RTÉ's The Meaning of Life, Gay Byrne has spoken with public figures about these questions and many others.

One of the cultural phenomena to occur in Ireland in the last two decades has been the highly successful growth of stand-up comedy as a popular entertainment genre. This book examines stand-up comedy from the perspective of the narrated self, through the prism of the fabricated comedy persona, including Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran and Maeve Higgins.

Seamus Heaney & the End of Catholic Ireland takes off from the poet’s growing awareness in the new millennium of “something far more important in my mental formation than cultural nationalism or the British presence or any of that stuff—namely, my early religious education.” It then pursues an examination of the full trajectory of Heaney’s religious beliefs as represented in his poetry, prose, and interviews, with a briefer account of the interactive religious histories of the Irish and international contexts in which he lived. Thus, in the 1940s and 50s, Heaney was inducted into the narrow, punitive, but also enabling Catholicism of the era. In the early 1960s he was witness to the lively religious debates from the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God to the seismic disruptions of Vatican II. When the conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants broke out, Heaney was forced to dig deep for an imaginative understanding of its religious roots. From the 1980s on, Heaney more and more proclaimed his own religious loss while also recognizing the institution’s residual value in an Irish society of rising prosperity, weariness with the atrocities of a partly religion-inspired IRA, and beset by the scandals of sex abuse among the clergy. Kieran Quinlan sees Heaney as an exemplar of this period of major change in Ireland as he engaged the religious issue not only in major writers such as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin, and Czeslaw Miłosz, but also in a diverse array of less familiar commentators lay and clerical, creative and academic, believers and unbelievers, Irish and international. Breaking new ground by expanding the scope of Heaney’s religious preoccupations and writing in an accessible, reflective, and sometimes provocative manner, Quinlan’s study places Heaney in his universe, and that universe in turn in its wider intellectual setting.

The book of Job is one of the oldest surviving pieces of writing in human history. It also deals with two of the biggest questions that humans have asked throughout history - what is God like, and why does he allow such suffering in the world? Allow Phil to take you on a journey through the book of Job to discover insights that have shaped the way that people have viewed God and viewed humanity for over 3,000 years. God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you read it and let it change your life. If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore’s devotional commentaries. Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship. Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible. Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

Following last year's bestselling collection of interviews from the RTE TV series The Meaning of Life, Gay Byrne is back with more big questions -- and more interesting answers. With Peter McVerry, he ponders whether life is shaped by accidents or by the way people respond to accidents. Mary Robinson reveals the beliefs and values that fuel her formidable moral engine. Eamon Dunphy's early experiences led him to believe that "everyone is magnificent in their own way," and Edna O'Brien discusses her struggles with the Catholic Church after the infamous banning of The Country Girls. We all look for meaning in our lives and here twenty well-known public figures share what gives their lives meaning, prompting us to ponder the question ourselves and perhaps even find some answers.