From World Mission to Interreligious Witness: Why Dialogue?

image 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 … Read more...

Questioning World Mission: Trinity College Conference on Ecumenics in the 21st Century

The Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, is marking the midpoint of its three-year research project this week with a conference, ‘From World Mission to Interreligious Witness: Visioning Ecumenics in the 21st Century.’

The conference is recognising the … Read more...

Sharing Sacred Spaces in County Fermanagh – A Walk with the Churches Forum

image 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 … Read more...

Norman Hamilton Takes Presbyterian Post: Moderating a Shared Future?

image 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 … Read more...

The UVF and the PUP: Is Transformation Possible? John Kyle on the Nolan Show

image 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 … Read more...

The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism?: Book Review

image 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 Read more...

The Apostolic Visitors are Coming: Wounded Healers and Healing for the Wounded?

image 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

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The Ryan Report and Irish Catholicism One Year On

image 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

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Communion with One Another? Questions from the Symposium on ‘The Eucharist in Ecumenical Perspective’

image What does it mean that Christians all over Ireland have begun to quietly defy the official teachings of their churches, choosing to receive Eucharist/ communion in churches that are not their own?

No one really knows how widespread this practice … Read more...