Roy Uprichard – Slugger O'Toole

On one of the last days of summer, swallows coast the currents. Where a kite might fly…

Roy Uprichard on August 30, 2026, 6:55 am

| Readers 459

a bunch of kites that are flying in the sky

Swallows skim the path, gone in a flash. Soon they’ll leave – towing the dreams of summer south, far from St Saviour’s Parish Church, set here above Greyabbey’s Gothic cloisters of ruined stone. Rooks caw-call the hours to roost. Light seeps a little. Tired leaves set for a fall. As our tilted world spins through the void on its sun circuit. Its angular balance enabling seasons. Too far and it’s chaos. On one of the last days of summer, swallows …

a report on the second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Dublin…

Roy Uprichard on July 12, 2026, 1:31 pm

| Readers 1304

On Friday the 26th of June, the second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress convened for three days in the Maldron Hotel, Tallaght, Dublin. The Maldron thankfully resisted pressure from a variety of actors to refuse hosting of this event. Around 450 attended on each of the two days I was there. The list of speakers included the prominent historian Ilan Pappe, UN special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Peace Activists Ronnie Barkan, Jude Farrell, Andrew Feinstein, Lara Elborno and many others. Ilan Pappe’s introductory …

The Living Stones…

Roy Uprichard on May 18, 2026, 12:17 pm

| Readers 1404

brown rock formation near body of water during daytime

They pass by and look the other way. The Good Samaritan script recast as a dystopia of white Christian disregard for the indigenous Church in Palestine. Their presence is an inconvenient reality that muddies a narrative of Western Judeo-Christian ‘values’ locked in mortal combat within a surrounding sea of Islamic ‘Terror.’ Best if Palestinian (and Lebanese) Christians should vacate the arena. Just disappear. Simplify matters. Certainly, they’re being encouraged to. The almost daily attacks on the Christian presence in and …

Over There. This Time of Year…

Roy Uprichard on December 7, 2025, 8:22 am

| Readers 696

white and orange light bokeh

It’s been ramped up to fever pitch – mob rule – Government endorsed. Pitchfork law … of clubs, guns, and torches. As West Bank settlers attack graveyards, burn houses, cars, brutally harass villagers, and steal land and lives. It’s all about erasure, of both Muslims and Christians, from the holy lands. But they don’t want to leave. Attached as they are so deeply to the land. For Faith is ancient in places like Taybeh, the last wholly Christian town in …

Empires, like angry beasts easily enraged, lash out with their long sweeping arms of impunity…

Roy Uprichard on October 26, 2025, 7:00 am

| Readers 1273

A standing man at the front of an East Belfast Church. Here to share a story. Passing on preamble he unbuttons his jacket, and, with his arms wide spread, asks us to observe, to confirm that he is human. Powered by heart, blood, breath, hopes and dreams. One who feels. Deeply. ‘Am I not also Human?’ As if brother to a Venetian Merchant objecting to his dehumanisation. But Rev Ashraf Tannous possesses a multiplicity of identities: Arab, Palestinian, Semitic. And …

Our Zones of Interest…

Roy Uprichard on August 24, 2025, 6:33 am

| Readers 2274

A pall of silence hangs over most of our churches. Prayer platitudes: Communion comforts, soothing sermons, finding ways to look away. From horror. Out of sight, out of mind, over there. Somewhere rainbow reticent. Our felt world unchanged, as the earth tilts further off balance, eighty something years after Auschwitz. We now create our own, updated Zones of Interest. But with essentially the same purpose: of masking the truth of what was going on ‘behind the wall.’ However, the story …

Some days, I think Evil has constellated in Gaza, with the ‘most moral’ mask torn away…

Roy Uprichard on June 29, 2025, 7:00 am

| Readers 1033

‘I want to live in a beautiful place.’ Adam al-Najarr. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to little ones such as these, He said. To receive them is to receive me. We know children don’t judge—they accept all others. They’re not yet socialised into tribes. They arrive fresh from God, with the scent of heaven on them. Any parent can testify that some of the holiest moments in life are when a newborn’s eyes lock onto theirs. The returned gaze forges …

How Should Christians Respond to the Horror of Gaza?

Roy Uprichard on April 19, 2025, 7:00 am

| Readers 1203

A group of people standing next to a pile of rubble

Sadly, most of us remain silent, constrained perhaps by claims of Israel’s centrality in ‘End Times’ Bible Prophecy and a movement that lobbies us to ‘Stand with Israel’. But a growing number now doubt that divine permission has been granted to ‘park’ Christ’s call to show love of both God and our neighbour as ourselves; to embrace justice, compassion, and mercy, even in times of conflict. We do not believe a Genesis promise of land to Abraham absolves the modern …

Why a Weaponised Bible? – Zionism, Christian or otherwise…

Roy Uprichard on April 4, 2025, 7:00 am

| Readers 1088

person's hand holding book page

How we read the Bible is vitally important. Do we see Jesus as the supreme revelation of Divinity? The One who condensed the Old Testament Law and the Prophets down to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbour as yourself’. Or, as many prefer, to qualify New Testament commands with Old. Instead of the reverse. While paying special attention to the ‘Chosen People for a Promised Land’ narrative. The latter is much …

Hillside Shepherds…

Roy Uprichard on December 25, 2023, 6:50 am

| Readers 510

The Nativity set figurine

What a night. In a certain Bethlehem stable. So … whilst Mary and Joseph recovered their breath, Gabe and a few friends had to be elsewhere. Startling neither Royal Court nor Temple cloister, but shepherds on a dark hillside on the edge of town; open air outsiders. No mistake, this. No misdirection. It was Intentional. As if sending a signal, you might think? Sent to those scented by their sheep, their calling keeping them from observing Sabbath. Those termed in …

We go to see new things, then perhaps see home with new eyes…

Roy Uprichard on December 26, 2022, 1:24 pm

| Readers 1478

white and black bus with green pine tree scale model

The High Street of a North Down coastal town is abuzz this morning with charity Santas atop tractors, their klaxon horns fit for a second coming. Christmas jumpers are also out, tinsel wrapped, in queues outside butchers’ or flitting in and out of un-shuttered shops: saddlers, greengrocers, jewellery and watch repairs, then bakers, hairdressers or ‘Ice Creams to go’. This street from another age has kept One-Click purchasing at bay. For now. It’s still a place of interaction, of social …

A Lewis Window…

Roy Uprichard on November 20, 2022, 6:55 am

| Readers 434

The following piece imagines Lewis’s Sunday afternoon childhood visits with his mother to his grandparents in St Mark’s Manse on the Holywood Road. Then a flight of fancy follows. ‘The part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.’ Letter from C.S.Lewis to his brother. You sit at an Oxford desk staring out to woods. But instead you see the play of light on the hills and shores of home: Cave Hill, Carlingford, then Castlerock and Dunluce …

Kilbroney, a C.S. Lewis Window and a Celtic Worldview…

Roy Uprichard on November 19, 2022, 7:00 am

| Readers 1454

It’s late November 2019, and I’m on my way to Kilbroney Forest Park, Rostrevor, County Down to read at a C.S. Lewis Festival event. As a boy, Lewis often holidayed there with his family. Decades later, writing to his brother Warnie, he confided, ‘That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.’ It is a monumental landscape that evokes comparison with Ballinskelligs Bay in Kerry or Galician Rias. And not just for their similar topographies but …

Missile Crises: Belfast, Havana and Kyiv…

Roy Uprichard on October 30, 2022, 2:00 pm

| Readers 1307

person watching through hole

‘The October drills of ‘62 were crazy,’ Elena said. ‘As if tables or desks would have saved us.’ As we walked, I’d already told her that one morning in my Primary school, our teacher told us in that Keep Calm and Carry On manner that World War 111 might break out any day. And that if the sirens went off, we must all get down quickly on our knees and hunch under our desks. Then she warned us to expect …

Spiralling down in a whirlpool wheel spin of casino economics…

Roy Uprichard on October 1, 2022, 8:43 am

| Readers 1358

#ENGAGEMENT

Picture a late November Advent evening last year. In a deconsecrated East Belfast church set midst where Morrisonian nostalgia lingered for decades. Oval shadowed across the way from Samson and Goliath’s stilled steel. In Mersey Street – with the heat from the wood-burning stove escaping far too quickly, swallowed in the shiver of a high, vaulted ceiling, atop paint peeling walls. Something hard to achieve, I thought – this authentic distressed look. Though somehow fitting. When we heard the story …

Meithal in Malafia…

Roy Uprichard on September 10, 2022, 9:11 am

| Readers 1536

Traditional Portuguese dessert pastel de nata on black background

North of Porto, on the Caminho da Costa, the boardwalk creaks and sways to the slap of September feet as we gather each other up like strays into the community of the Road. Gerry from Dublin, ‘Just had to get back.’ His Camino Frances, two years ago, ‘was full of special people and places.’ He finds it strange that, as a member of the Irish Humanist Society, he’s drawn to the Camino. ‘I suppose religion is still lodged in us somewhere.’ He …

A Belfast Good Friday – at 24. You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes ….

Roy Uprichard on August 27, 2022, 7:00 am

| Readers 1436

I was randomly shooting the sunset when a family decided to walk back from the sea to the beach, I was just perfectly aligned with them and the golden hour sun. Captured the cute moment where the mother and father were holding hands. They noticed me afterwards and they asked if I had an instagram so they could see my work. We had a little chat and I showed the fresh photo directly on my camera screen, they were really happy with it !I love the tones and how the backlight enhances group.

World events. Too many of them. Their images blur, racing past much too fast to process. Then a pause for thought midst the stalemate of home. And I’m trawling through YouTube clips of John Hume and David Trimble, in a Big Yellow Taxi moment – of not really knowing what you’ve got ’till it’s gone. Lingering over those late nineties snapshots of possibility personified by our Nobel laureates felt like bathing in the warm glow of slightly fading family photographs. …

Pilgrim and Tourist – in North West Spain…

Roy Uprichard on August 6, 2022, 7:30 am

| Readers 1670

Taken in Valldemossa

Close now to places I walked through last year. A glimpse of riverside willows racing past the car’s window, then the Puente Santa Maria. A year gone in a flash, like the swallows skimming the road ahead. Too soon they’ll leave, towing the dreams of summer south. Time speeding up even as it counts down. Summers’ shortening, gone like the bluebirds. Leaving us with our Celtic quandary – that of souls riven by a deep love of home and yet …

Something Unresolved – The 50th Anniversary of Bloody Friday…

Roy Uprichard on July 21, 2022, 2:10 pm

| Readers 4419

The room was spartan. Two chairs, a few books on a table and a filing cabinet. Where she kept notes, no doubt – on other stragglers who’d dragged their excess baggage up the stairs. I told of the house purchase gone wrong, how stupid I felt, and the sense of being trapped. She wrote something down. ‘If only I could get an unbroken night’s sleep, I might be able to cope.’ She asked when that problem started. I weighed up …