To Cope With Hope

In Northern Ireland, there has been a big increase in suicides since the early-nineties, before the first ceasefire in 1994, rising particularly throughout the period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Many are concerned about the trend, which is often seen when...

Can we have a civil society, please?

(Note: This article first appeared on www.eamonnmallie.com on 2 Dec 2012, and is distributed with the author’s permission) Is it just me, or is there anyone else out there getting more and more dispirited about the quality of public discourse? Arguments on an ad...

Alcoholism and Dignity

I stood bedside a person paralytic on their sofa covered in blood and bodily fluids. The Emergency Service could not take this person to hospital as they became conscious and refused to go.Social Services could not work with them due to their addiction. I read the...

A Story Worth Living For

In a recent book, War and the American Difference*, Stanley Hauerwas explores why it is that Americans have a distinct lack of unease with war. War, he says, ‘is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike...

Justice for just us?

There was a hint of specks and planks (Matthew 7: 2-5) in recent statements in the Northern Ireland Assembly by unionist political representatives. Demanding apologies from the Irish government about their predecessors’ undoubted ambivalence towards IRA activity...

Ploughshares and pruning hooks – a relevant prophecy?

‘They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks’   Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3 Recently I heard it stated that ‘…creatives, artists, have responsibility to define the vision of the future (of what peace might look like in N Ireland), and...