Saturday’s Irish Times outlines the options facing President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in their efforts to pass health care reform in the United States. I’m an American, and I have followed the somewhat tedious rounds of debates with both amazement and despair.
Many Americans believe they have the best health care system in the world. That’s what the Republicans have said, although they also have said that the system is broken. Then there is Fox News, whose presenters continually shout about how horrible ‘socialised’ health care is in the UK or Canada.
Continue reading ‘US Health Care Debate – Christian Options?’
Today Dr Claire Mitchell and I visited East Belfast Mission, where we spoke about our forthcoming book, Meet the Evangelicals: Journeys in a Northern Irish Religious Subculture, due to be published by UCD Press in the next year.
The title of our talk was ‘Choosing My Religion: Evangelicals in Northern Ireland Tell Stories of Religious Journey.’ The question at the core of our research on evangelicalism for the past ten years has been, ‘why do people from the same religious community choose such different religious paths?’ We think our talk today shed some light on that question. We received additional insights in the feedback that we received from an attentive and passionate audience.
Continue reading ‘Choosing Our Religion: Workshop at East Belfast Mission’
The Fermanagh Churches Forum started its series of Lenten lunches yesterday. Over four weeks, participants in the forum will meet in the Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist and Church of Ireland churches for a lunch and reflection. It’s the quiet sort of ecumenism that happens in different parts of this island.
One of the members of the Presbyterian congregation, Sheila Phillips, read from Isaiah 58. This passage talks about the kind of ‘fasting’ that God desires. In a nutshell, it says that God doesn’t want people to ‘give up’ things in a way that is merely formal or ritualistic.
Continue reading ‘Ecumenism for Lent: Giving Out, not Giving Up’
There is more to the Catholic Church than sex abuse scandals.
Although that is a rather obvious point, in contemporary Ireland, it’s a fact that could quite easily get overlooked. Of course Catholics and other concerned citizens are right to criticise the Catholic Church and its failings in the Irish context. But a recent book edited by Prof. Linda Hogan, Applied Ethics in a World Church: the Padua Conference (Orbis, 2008), is a timely reminder not only of the global scope of Catholicism, but also of a spirit of critical enquiry that is informing new ethical developments among Catholic theologians.
Prof. Hogan is Head of the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin. Her edited volume is based on a conference that drew more than 400 Catholic moral theologians to Padua, Italy in 2006, to participate in what she calls ‘the first international, cross-cultural conversation on theological ethics’ (p.1). The book, which has won the prestigious Catholic Book Award from the Catholic Press Association of the USA and Canada, features 30 chapters by a genuinely international panel of scholars.
Continue reading ‘Linda Hogan Book Review: Applied Ethics in a World Church’
Gerry Adams’ presentation of a programme on the Channel 4 series ‘The Bible: A History,’ has provoked a flurry of comment and indignation on this morning’s radio phone-in shows and in the blogosphere.
The subject of Adams’ programme was ‘Jesus.’ This has prompted the inevitable observations that Adams tries to equate the republican struggle with the situation of the Jews under Roman occupation during Jesus’ time. This could lead to some rather uncomfortable Adams-Jesus parallels. For example, there is debate over on Slugger O’Toole about whether Adams was really trying to massage the Christian message to justify the IRA campaign.
Continue reading ‘Gerry Adams & Jesus: Forgiveness is the Core of the Gospel’
Tomorrow, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams will be the featured guest on the Channel 4 series, ‘The Bible: A History.’ The series bills itself as, ‘the story of the most influential book ever written, interpreted by seven prominent figures from different walks of life.’
Friday’s Belfast Telegraph carries an interview with Alan McBride, whose wife and father-in-law were killed in the IRA Shankill bomb in 1993. McBride, a graduate of my School’s master’s in Reconciliation Studies, now works at the WAVE Trauma Centre and is a member of the Northern Ireland Victims Forum. He has dedicated his life to building peace.
Continue reading ‘Gerry Adams & Forgiveness: Alan McBride on the Channel 4 series ‘The Bible: A History’’
Phyllis Tickle is one of the featured speakers at the Belfast Re-Emergence Conference on March 16-18, 2010. Her book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Baker Books, 2008) sets contemporary controversies, upheavals, and developments within Christianity in a sweeping historical context, proclaiming that we are at one of the ‘hinges’ of a great 500-year cycle. She argues that Christianity is being changed into something new and dynamic, and responding – as it has done in epochs past – to the probing questions of the present age.
Lest post-moderns begin to worry that Tickle has constructed a grand, overarching narrative that explains everything: rest assured. That is not the project with which this book is concerned. Rather, Tickle provides us with a concise, elegantly written interpretation of the 2000-year Christian story that allows us to gain some perspective on what may seem, to us, a tumultuous time in which Western Christian faith has been battered almost beyond recognition.
Continue reading ‘Phyllis Tickle Book Review: The Great Emergence & the Re-Emergence Conference, Belfast’
It’s a long way from Clare to Checkpoint 300. Barbara Walshe, a native of Co. Clare and a student on the Master’s in Reconciliation Studies programme at our Belfast campus, has recently returned from a stint with the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Israel and Palestine (EAPPI).
Walshe shared her experiences at a public seminar at our campus on Tuesday. Her story is at once fascinating, depressing, and inspiring. Walshe was based in Bethlehem this past summer with EAPPI. Her main task was monitoring Checkpoint 300. Palestinians, mainly male construction workers, must queue here daily to pass from Bethlehem to work in Jerusalem.
Continue reading ‘Barbara Walshe in the West Bank: Witness at Checkpoint 300′
Two days of talks between the Pope and the Irish bishops seem to have confirmed what victims of clerical sex abuse have suspected: In the eyes of Rome, they are second-class Christians.
Victims and survivors have expressed disappointment and anger at the outcome of the talks. Andrew Madden, the first person in Ireland to publicly file a lawsuit against the church, simply said that survivors had been completely ignored.
Continue reading ‘Irish Bishops in Rome – Victims still feel like Second-Class Christians’
This morning’s mass in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome had a special message for the Irish bishops: ‘clergy who had sinned must admit blame for "abominable acts".’
The Irish Times reports that Vatican secretary of State Cardinal Bertone spoke at the morning mass, which preceded crisis talks between the Pope and the Irish bishops about how to respond to Ireland’s clerical sex abuse scandals.
Continue reading ‘Will the Irish Catholic Church Repent?’
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