My latest book, Considering Grace: Presbyterians and the Troubles (Merrion Press, 2019), co-authored with Jamie Yohanis, has been featured in this month’s edition of the Presbyterian Herald.
The book, which will be launched on 5 November in Belfast, tells the stories of 120 ordinary people’s experiences of the Troubles, exploring how faith shaped their responses to violence and its aftermath.
In the Herald article, Ruth Sanderson wrote:
The book is not an easy read – I read it with a lump in my throat – as the tragedy of the Troubles spilled out of every page; memories reliving terrible times as though only yesterday. Yet it is an extraordinary piece of work. Not just as a historical record of people’s experiences, but also from an empathetic point of view. It lets us experience not only how that awful time impacted on all sorts of people, in all sorts of ways, but it challenges our own response. How would we react? How have we reacted? How has the past 50 years inevitably shaped us? What’s our own story?
The four page article can be read here; and hard copies can be ordered online.
Considering Grace is the result of a research project commissioned by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. It is the first book to capture such a full range of experiences of the Troubles of people from a Protestant background.
Presbyterian ministers, victims, members of the security forces, emergency responders, healthcare workers and ‘critical friends’ of the Presbyterian tradition are among those to provide insights on wider human experiences of anger, pain, healing, and forgiveness.
You can find more information about the book, including how to order it, here. This page also will be updated with details about the book launch in Belfast, and four further regional launches planned for November in Londonderry, Ballymena, Armagh, and Enniskillen.
While Considering Grace takes a backward look at the Troubles, it tries to do so in such a way that we are motivated to build a better future together. As journalist Susan McKay writes in her foreword to Considering Grace:
This fine book contributes to the literature that tries to enable us to emerge with humanity from the darkness.
An afterword by Alan McBride, peace campaigner and manager of the WAVE Trauma Centre, also urges readers to reflect on the book in light of the future:
It would be my prayer for everyone who pores over the pages of the book that lessons can be learned and a new pathway to peace and shared living forged.
In the Herald story, Sanderson includes a quote from me along those lines:
You can never really say that it’s just history. People may not recognise the transgenerational transmission of trauma. When you read the book you have to realise that. We are in a political vacuum, we haven’t had a government for nearly a thousand days. You don’t want to be alarmist about it, but we could be sleep walking back into the Troubles. The book should remind people how terrible it was. We need to get creative and get working so that we never go back.