In the latter sessions of a conference held last week at Trinity College Dublin, ‘From World Mission to Interreligious Witness: Visioning Ecumenics in the 21st Century,’ the theologians and others gathered there began to get around to some crucial questions not only about the importance of interreligious dialogue, but of moving beyond that to ‘witness.’ [...]
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Sharing Sacred Spaces in County Fermanagh – A Walk with the Churches Forum
Ecumenism in Northern Ireland is in what might be described as a quiet stage. Gone are some of the outrageous events of the 1960s, when the Rev. Ian Paisley and his Free Presbyterians staged regular protests against ecumenism outside the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. But ecumenism hasn’t gone away, you know. [...]
Norman Hamilton Takes Presbyterian Post: Moderating a Shared Future?
Norman Hamilton was installed as the new moderator last night at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. A pastor for the past 22 years at Ballysillan Presbyterian, in a tough part of north Belfast, Hamilton can speak from experience about the urgent need for improved community relations. In his first speech as [...]
The UVF and the PUP: Is Transformation Possible? John Kyle on the Nolan Show
The interim leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), Dr John Kyle, had his first interview with Stephen Nolan today. Even under normal circumstances this would be a baptism of fire for a politician, but it was especially the case given the situation Kyle finds himself in. The murder by the UVF of Bobby Moffett [...]
The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism?: Book Review
If the Pope’s team of apostolic visitors want to prepare for their upcoming visit to Ireland, a good place to start would be a new book edited by John Littleton and Eamon Maher, The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism? (Columba, 2010) The book gathers an impressive array of perspectives on the handling of [...]
The Apostolic Visitors are Coming: Wounded Healers and Healing for the Wounded?
The Pope has announced the team of apostolic visitors who will conduct an investigation into clerical sex abuse in Ireland. The Irish Times’ Patsy McGarry remarks that the Vatican has sent in ‘heavy hitters.’ McGarry says: THERE HAS never been anything like it where the Catholic Church is concerned. It is fair to say that [...]
David Stevens – In Memory of a Peacemaker
David Stevens, Leader of the Corrymeela Community, died from cancer on Sunday at the age of 62. A founding member of the Community Relations Council, Stevens also worked for 25 years in the Inter Church Centre in Belfast, serving for 12 years as General Secretary of the Irish Council of Churches and Executive Secretary of [...]
Alistair Little Book Review: Give a Boy a Gun
Recently one of the students on my School’s Master’s in Reconciliation Studies programme told me that the most powerful book he had read during the year was Give a Boy a Gun: One Man’s Journey from Killing to Peace-Making, by Alistair Little (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2009). The book is the autobiography of a former [...]
The Ryan Report and Irish Catholicism One Year On
In the recently published book, The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism? (Columba Press, 2010), Fr Enda McDonagh writes (p. 113): ‘Given the spate of commentary on and of proposals for Church reform which have followed the Ryan and Murphy Reports of 2009, there is bound to be little new to say or to [...]
About me
Welcome to Building a Church Without Walls, a website for people who are excited about how Christianity is developing in the 21st Century. I am a Lecturer and Coordinator of the Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation Studies Programme at Trinity College Dublin at Belfast (the Irish School of Ecumenics).
Please note this is my personal site. All views are my own and are not representative of TCD.
