Books – Page 2 – Slugger O'Toole

Slugger TV-Brian Rowan talking about Political Purgatory

David McCann on April 28, 2021, 7:59 am | Readers 904

In this months Slugger TV I chat with the author of the new book Political Purgatory, Brian Rowan. – – – Added by Alan Meban … Throughout his reporting on the peace process, ceasefires and agreements, Rowan kept fastidious notes, filing away original copies of statements and creating a rich archive that he can dip back into. The passing of time – and often the death of actors from all sides of the Troubles – means that the publication of …

How Britain Ends: Gavin Esler in conversation … coming up on Saturday 27 March at #imaginebelfast

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on March 18, 2021, 5:40 pm | Readers 1598

Chatting to Gavin Esler ahead of his appearance on Saturday 27 at this year’s Imagine! Festival. He’s enthusiastic to be back talking about his book How Britain Ends, though is disappointed not to have the excuse to meet up with old friends and walk the streets he knows so well from living and working in the city.

The State of Us … Previewing the seventh annual Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics (22-28 March)

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on March 13, 2021, 10:01 am | Readers 390

A quick rummage through the Imagine! Belfast programme coming up between 22–28 March. Under the strapline of The State of Us, there’ll be exhibitions, workshops, lectures, film, comedy, music, spoken word, lectures, theatre and quizzes. Voices from at home and abroad. The festival isn’t afraid to challenge. It doesn’t expect participants to agree with everything that is said. It’s about making people think. Widening their horizons. Broadening their understanding. Developing their empathy. Helping them figure out why – and if – they truly believe the hunches and biases they may have been living with for a lifetime.

Everything is Spiritual by Rob Bell: Part Memoir, Part Hymn for Humanity

Gladys Ganiel on November 15, 2020, 8:15 am | Readers 1851

My eyes had already welled up with tears after the first three pages of Rob Bell’s latest book, Everything is Spiritual: Who we are and What we’re doing Here. Those early pages took me to his grandmother’s front porch on a windswept farm in central Michigan, introducing me to the grief and love that shaped him and set his life on its course. My emotional response testifies to Bell’s skill as a storyteller, which makes Everything is Spiritual a quick, …

Love’s Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and the Rise of New Religions in Ireland by Peter Mulholland: New Insights on Recent Religious History

Gladys Ganiel on October 4, 2020, 8:15 am | Readers 5198

In Love’s Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and the Rise of New Religions in Ireland (Peter Lang Publishers, 2019) Peter Mulholland offers a frank and often bruising account of the decline of the authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland since the middle of the twentieth century. Mulholland follows in the footsteps of ground-breaking studies, such as those by Tom Inglis (Moral Monopoly, 1987, 1998) and Louise Fuller (Irish Catholicism Since 1950, 2002). What sets Mulholland’s work apart is how …

John Hewitt Digital Festival of Literature and Ideas 2020

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on July 27, 2020, 4:03 pm | Readers 418

The John Hewitt Society have moved their Armagh summer school online with a series of free online talks and discussions. While we normally take Slugger TV out of the NvTv studio to record in front of the Armagh audience, we’re delighted to be opening this year’s festival with a discussion about “After lockdown, can the arts return to health without a vaccine?”. Read more about this and the rest of the programme …

As the pace of modern life gets quicker all the time, poetry provides a much needed pause…

Lynda Tavakoli on July 5, 2020, 7:10 am | Readers 1391

“My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.” (Groucho Marx 1895 -1977) I know I’m treading on precarious territory here with that one word – poetry. There. Many of you will have zoned out already but I hope you’ll stay with me for a little longer as I try to untangle my thoughts on a subject that seems to divide so many folks, in so many different ways. But before …

Book launch: Paul Gosling’s “A New Ireland – A New Union: A New Society”

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on May 11, 2020, 9:30 am | Readers 4256

Slugger O’Toole is delighted to be hosting the online book launch of Paul Gosling’s new edition of A New Ireland – A New Union: A New Society. David McCann was joined by the author as well as political commentator Sarah Creighton to discuss some of the issues raised in the two-hundred-page title.

Church during Lockdown? – From Virtual Religion to Bronagh Lawson’s ‘Belfast: City of Light’

Gladys Ganiel on May 2, 2020, 7:00 am | Readers 2612

Earlier this week, the DUP’s Edwin Poots suggested that churches could reopen as part of a process of exiting the Covid-19 lockdown. Poots’s comments have provoked debate. Fr Paddy McCafferty of Corpus Christi parish, Ballymurphy, told BBC Radio Ulster that if reopening could be safely achieved ‘we should certainly look at every possible way of achieving that’. Poots’s DUP colleague Paul Givan made a case for opening of churches with large buildings, arguing that social distancing could be achieved in …

A Triple Rainbow of Hope: Good Friday 1988

Gladys Ganiel on April 10, 2020, 9:26 am | Readers 1093

By now, we are all familiar with the rainbow as a symbol of hope during the Covid-19 crisis. Today, I am reminded of a Good Friday story of hope from our past: the sighting of a triple rainbow at the end of a Falls-Shankill Good Friday walk, organised by the ecumenical Cornerstone Community in 1988. The 1988 walk took place in the shadow of one of the most notorious periods of the Troubles, memorably recounted in the documentary 14 Days. Those …

Book Review: The Irish Presbyterian Mind by Andrew Holmes

Gladys Ganiel on April 6, 2020, 3:18 pm | Readers 1179

At a recent academic seminar, I remarked (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that what defines Irish Presbyterianism is that it cannot agree on anything. I was alluding to the fact that historically, Irish Presbyterians have disagreed on a range of theological, social and political issues; indeed, over several centuries Irish Presbyterians have been preoccupied by such ‘family feuds’. Today, Presbyterian disagreements tend to be reflected in rather crude caricatures of so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative evangelical’ wings of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland …

How Should we Remember Seamus Mallon? Together – in a Spirit of Christian Love and Forgiveness…

Gladys Ganiel on January 26, 2020, 7:30 am | Readers 2816

The passing of Seamus Mallon should remind us that Northern Ireland’s hard-won peace is due to the efforts of men and women of integrity whose non-violent politics and personal sacrifice got us to that point. We are fortunate that in the last year of his life, Seamus left us a memoir, A Shared Home Place, that not only recounted his historical role in the peace process but was orientated towards the future. In it, he advocated political ‘generosity’ and proposed …

What a Day Out with the Redemptorists says about the Future of the Irish Catholic Church

Gladys Ganiel on November 27, 2019, 12:40 pm | Readers 1329

On Saturday I took part in a day-long gathering for friends and associates of the Redemptorists in Ireland. The event grew out of a similar meeting at the 2018 World Meeting of Families in Dublin, during Pope Francis’ visit. Given that my biography of Redemptorist priest Fr Gerry Reynolds, Unity Pilgrim, was published earlier this year, I was asked to facilitate an afternoon workshop on ‘Unity Pilgrim: Challenged by the Stranger, Welcoming the Stranger’. I co-facilitated the workshop with Ed …

Book Review: The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968-1999, by Margaret M. Scull

Gladys Ganiel on November 25, 2019, 1:03 pm | Readers 4063

A rich and carefully-researched new book, The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968-1999 (Oxford University Press, 2019), offers fresh insights on the changing role of the Catholic Church and the personalities that drove its interventions during that fraught period. The author, Margaret M. Scull, a post-doctoral research fellow at NUI Galway, writes in a clear, accessible style, ensuring the text will be of interest not only to scholars, but a general readership. There will be a Belfast launch …

From ‘Unions and Unionism’ and Brexit, to Seamus Mallon’s ‘Shared Home Place’ …

Gladys Ganiel on October 17, 2019, 3:34 pm | Readers 1430

Next week, Queen’s University will host a symposium on ‘Unions and Unionism: Brexit and these Islands’. It’s an apt opportunity for reflection given the increasingly tumultuous Brexit negotiations and the DUP’s place in this precarious process. The symposium begins on Thursday 24 October, 4.45-6.30 pm with a keynote address on ‘Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice: Three Meanings of Brexit’ by Kalypso Nicolaidis, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford. Friday 25 October …

The polite rebel: Sheelagh Murnaghan

Allan LEONARD (Mr Ulster) on October 6, 2019, 2:38 pm | Readers 2103

The polite rebel: Sheelagh Murnaghan by Allan LEONARD 3 October 2019 Sheelagh Murnaghan was the only Liberal Party MP (1961-69) in the Northern Ireland Parliament, representing the constituency of Queen’s University Belfast, which was the venue for a launch event of a new biography about her remarkable life. There were many Murnaghan family members in the audience of a few dozen attending. The book, Sheelagh Murnaghan, was commissioned by the Albert McElroy Memorial Fund, which was established to commemorate the …

‘Unless we start listening, we’re not going to move forward’

Paul Gosling on September 2, 2019, 7:04 am | Readers 949

“Unless we start listening, we’re not really going to move forward,” says Julieann Campbell, editor of the Unheard Voices collection of women’s stories from the Troubles. She was interviewed in the latest Forward Together podcast. Julieann reflects in the podcast on the impact on her of the interviews with women about their experiences in the Troubles. “I think it has affected me on several levels, emotionally and in my work,” she says. “It is a fact that it has made …

How Loyalism Remembers: Review of Ghosts of the Somme by Jonathan Evershed

Gladys Ganiel on July 30, 2019, 7:57 pm | Readers 3416

‘… commemoration of the Somme represents a (if not the) chief means by which Loyalists are able to participate in the political, cultural, and social life of Northern Ireland and attempts to circumscribe particular commemorative forms risks further alienating Loyalists from processes of peace-building in which they already perceive themselves as having little stake.’ – Jonathan Evershed, Ghosts of the Somme, p. 19 This is the most important argument in a new book by Jonathan Evershed, Ghosts of the Somme: …

James O’Brien and the lost journalistic art of asking decent questions…

Mick Fealty on July 11, 2019, 2:29 pm | Readers 6275

Ever since I started Slugger back 2002, and having only just discovered the opportunities which blogging offered to a humble, prospecting researcher like myself I’ve always been interested as much in the cultural effects of net based comms as in the subject itself. With our John Hewitt session coming up, I thought it timely to look at the latest writing on the subject and so I called into Blackwells on Monday and I couldn’t pass James O’Brien’s How to be …

Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland by Jonathan Blake – Essential Reading for the Summer Season

Gladys Ganiel on June 19, 2019, 9:41 am | Readers 3718

Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland (Oxford, 2019), a new book by American political scientist Jonathan Blake, is essential reading as Northern Ireland’s summer parading season begins in earnest. Blake helps us understand why those who parade – and those who don’t – are almost always talking past each other. Readers of this book should gain a better understanding of why those who parade genuinely feel that their culture is under attack and believe that their participation in …