The Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics And The End Of Sectarianism

Book Summary

To everybody's great relief, the Good Friday Agreement resulted in the cessation of the paramilitary violence that had ravaged Northern Ireland. However, it barely impacted a key underlying factor in that conflict: prejudice and animosity between Protestants and Catholics. This book argues that what Ireland and Northern Ireland need now is a peace process that changes the hearts and minds-and not merely the civic structures-of their inhabitants. Toward this goal, The Real Peace Process shows how Christian worship has been implicated in sectarianism, and how it might become a prime location in which sectarianism can be challenged and transformed. Based on extensive fieldwork in Protestant and Catholic churches across the whole island, The Real Peace Process shows how worship habits, attitudes and patterns that Irish and British Christians usually think of as benign can be distorted by sectarian norms from the wider culture. By examining the spatial, verbal, symbolic, musical and interpersonal aspects of everyday worship services, Garrigan first sketches a liturgical anthropology and then proceeds to propose critical and constructive means by which ordinary congregations in Ireland and Northern Ireland can use their Sunday morning ritualizing to help them move beyond sectarianism.

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