JUST before Easter I met a young writer who had been a student of mine in UCD's English department some 10 years ago. Perhaps because it was Holy Thursday we found ourselves - talking about faith.

Mark (let's call him) has not lost his roots in Catholicism and indeed has deepened his sense of faith over the years. Since I had been living outside Ireland for six years, I asked him how his contemporaries now view religious faith. After all, this has been a period of explosive change for the church here, for its image and its reality. But I did not realise how much the new culture seems to put religion "off limits" for his generation - of late 20s or early 30s.

"I mentioned to someone," said Mark, "that I was off drink for Lent and her first reaction was shock that I would use such a religious word in polite society. But then it emerged that she too was secretly a believer!"

"Believing is a lonely language in my generation," he added. "It's a bit like Irish. Unless you go to a special club, you don't expect to find others who speak it fluently. Or perhaps being religious is like being gay it's not something you admit to everyone straight off. Faith has certainly gone shy and yet it's there more often than you think. Scepticism may be the required mask, but it's not the whole picture."

In its way Mark's story echoes some of the lively US debates of recent years on cultural issues. In 1993 Stanley Carter published his bestseller The Culture of Disbelief with the subtitle, How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. This expert on constitutional law diagnosed that religion is being made impotent in the public sphere and that faith is reduced to the level of a hobby by the dominant culture.

The message is that "it's perfectly all right to believe that stuff" provided you keep it to yourself. Religion, in short, is not "a fit activity for intelligent, public spirited adults." So called "culture wars" can break out when people resist this "liberal" reduction of religion, and these wars reveal major differences over philosophies of life.

For Mr Carter and others "culture" has become not only a fashionable buzzword, but a key concept for understanding the environment that shapes our attitudes and practices. Culture with a capital "C", meaning the worlds of creativity or mind, has widened to culture with a small "c"; in the sense of invisible assumptions and the more everyday.

In Ireland religion has been a powerful strand in both dimensions of culture. Judged more negatively, the church had a domineering role in the culture of pre modern Ireland (up to the 60s) and is now accused of trying to preserve its power in the modern or perhaps post modern present. But something more subtle may also be happening.

Mark would suggest that current forms of domineering come from another direction and that a certain silencing of religious expressions is caused by the dominant culture around him. The question becomes whether the new cultural mood induces an unhealthy shyness towards faith - even among those who "have" faith.

When distrust of churches hardens into prejudice, it is difficult for theology to be accepted as a real partner in debates about our emerging self images.

Thus old agendas make listening impossible. Immature levels of communication reinforce mutual distance between religious and secular positions. Cultural skirmishing rules the day and can remain unrecognised. To reach a decent level of exchange is never easy but, I would argue, it is one of the urgent needs of Ireland just now - for both South and North - to heal different wounds and to overcome different forms of non listening.

AN example from Italy may help. It is not infrequent for a church leader, like Cardinal Martini or Cardinal Ruini, to engage in written face to face dialogue with some distinguished representative of "secular culture" such as the writer Umberto Eco or Massimo Cacciari, the philosopher mayor of Venice. The level of the exchanges is impressively high intellectually, in terms of mutual courtesy and in wanting to do justice to the vision of the other person.

The goal is to explore various key issues affecting our humanity today and the themes chosen have ranged from spirituality and art to suffering and social solidarity. Of course divergences emerge but the very attempt to have such conversations in public is evidence of a willingness to search for new understanding together.

Beyond sniping or silencing, beyond point scoring or skirmishing, we too need honest and discerning dialogue about where our culture has come from and where it is going. And one does not need cardinals to get something under way.

Michael Paul Gallagher is a Jesuit priest who teaches theology in Rome for half the academic year. He has just published Clashing Symbols an introduction to faith and culture (Darton, Longman & Todd, £9.95)