This book is a fascinating study of radical clergymen in Ireland from different traditions and varying times. In ten chapters we meet Presbyterian, Catholic and Church of Ireland clergy who spoke for inclusion of all people in an Ireland free of sectarian hatreds and economic oppressions.
They spoke fearlessly and always at a tangent to prevailing orthodoxies. Their honesty incurred trouble for themselves not only with civil authorities but with vested interests in their churches. Their thought ranges from theology to social analysis. Their common bond is a radical diagnosis of our longstanding hostilities and courage to articulate that diagnosis. Many of them offered an Irish “political theology” every bit as radical as liberation theology today.
The book accompanies the reader through dramatic periods of Irish history - the United Irishmen, the relapse into sectarian difficulties of the early 18th century, the Famine, the re-emergence of Irish separatism from the late 1860s, and the foundations of a partitioned Ireland. It draws on academic history while paying full attention to local traditions and the insights of modern political theology.
Denis Carroll, historian and theologian is author of They Have Fooled You Again and The Man from God Knows Where.
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