I blogged previously about the controversy around moving the Belfast City Marathon from Bank Holiday Monday to a Sunday. The Alan in Belfast blog has a constructive and thought-provoking new post on this topic.
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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 [...]
What’s Faith Got to do with Human Rights? Publication of Rights and Righteousness
What’s faith got to do with human rights? That’s one of the questions explored in a new publication, edited by Dr David Tombs of Trinity College Dublin at Belfast (the Irish School of Ecumenics), Rights and Righteousness: Perspectives on Religious Pluralism and Human Rights. The publication was featured this morning on BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday [...]
Peter Robinson, Naomi Long, and the 2010 Westminster Elections: A New Era in Northern Irish Politics?
This morning I had the rather surreal experience of a Benedictine monk greeting me with news of one election result I didn’t expect: the Alliance Party’s Naomi Long had defeated Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader and Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson in the election for the Westminster Parliament. So I’ll have an interesting answer [...]
DUP Election Broadcast: Will Looking Back Keep Northern Ireland Moving Forward?
The Democratic Unionist Party has a lot to worry about in this election. Traditional Unionist Voice’s Jim Allister has been smelling blood ever since the DUP’s compromise with Sinn Fein. Especially in the conservative heartlands, the TUV cause may get a boost from the Iris Robinson scandal and suspicions over Peter Robinson’s dodgy property deals. [...]
Is Northern Ireland Stuck with the Same Old Politics?: Platform for Change Meeting April 17
The Platform for Change will hold its next public meeting on Saturday April 17 in room G09 in the Lanyon Building at Queen’s University, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Coffee will be available from 9.30. The immediate topic of discussion is the upcoming Westminster election, and what the Platform for Change should say publicly about it. There [...]
The Dissidents, the Car Bomb, and Policing and Justice
People in Northern Ireland woke up this morning to the news that dissident republicans had detonated a car bomb outside Palace Barracks in Holywood, the headquarters of MI5. The Real IRA claims responsibility for the bomb, designed as a protest against the devolution of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont. An elderly man [...]
Gerry Adams: The Troubles & The Truth
Will we ever know the truth about Gerry Adams and the roles he played during the Troubles? Perhaps the more important question is whether we want to know. The publication in the Sunday Times of the first part in a serialisation of journalist Ed Moloney’s new book, Voices from the Grave, contains quotations from a [...]
Norman Hamilton, New Presbyterian Moderator: Relationships Matter
This morning’s BBC Radio Ulster edition of Sunday Sequence featured an interview with the newly elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Norman Hamilton. Hamilton had a fairly wide-ranging conversation with presenter William Crawley in the ten minute slot which started the programme. One of Hamilton’s more memorable lines was that ‘relationships matter,’ 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.
