Building a Church Without Walls
“The churches in Northern Ireland are too posh-looking, their hedges are too high.”
This was the assessment offered by Margaret Blair, a volunteer at The Gap Christian outreach project in Coleraine, speaking on BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence. Blair’s interview … Read more...
Dave Tomlinson is one of the keynote speakers at the Belfast Re-Emergence Conference, ‘The Church is Dead, Long Live the Church,’ scheduled for March 16-18, 2010, at the Irish School of Ecumenics (Trinity College Dublin at Belfast). In his most … Read more...
After a century of ecumenism, where are we? Most scholars date the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement to the 1910 Edinburgh Conference, where church leaders gathered to forge a way forward for greater cooperation in missionary endeavours. But 100 … Read more...
‘Born Again,’ is a term that is used derisively in Ireland to denote conservative evangelical Christians. Outsiders sometimes refer to them collectively as ‘the born agains,’ with either a smirk or a sigh, signalling their disagreement with their religion and … Read more...
The ancient Celtic world and its larger-than-life inhabitants have too often been manipulated for political and religious ends. A glance at some of the gable walls of Northern Ireland’s cities make that all too clear.
But the Celtic tradition … Read more...
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has a whiff of the ‘worthy cause’ about it, for those who are not opposed to the idea of ecumenism altogether. Perhaps ‘Christian Unity’ sounds like something that would be a good idea, … Read more...
Ecumenism is boring. In the same journal article I discussed in yesterday’s post, Dr Andrew Pierce quotes Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, who called ecumenism the ‘great yawn of our time,’ and H.A. Williams, who dismissed ecumenism as the ‘last refuge … Read more...
My colleague Dr Andrew Pierce has identified a failure of the ecumenical imagination in an article, ‘Re-imagining Irish Ecumenism: Enlarging a Sense of the Possible,’ in the journal Doctrine and Life (2008). It seems that ecumenism, both in Ireland and … Read more...
The week of prayer for Christian Unity begins next week, 18-25 January 2010, with activities planned throughout Ireland and Northern Ireland. Christian unity and ecumenism have always been touchy subjects on this island, given the sectarian nature of Northern Ireland’s … Read more...
The former Catholic primate of Ireland, Cardinal Cahal Daly, died yesterday at the age of 92. On the eve of what promises to be yet another difficult year for the Irish Catholic Church, Cardinal Daly’s death seems to have created … Read more...