Floret: The Irish School of Ecumenics at 50
ANNIVERSARIES provide an occasion for reflection, about the past and future. Although it has been challenging, marking the ISE’s 50th anniversary during the COVID pandemic has been clarifying because so much of what we do and value as a society has been thrown into sharp relief. As novelist Marilynne Robinson noted, whereas the coronavirus “has the potential for mitigation, treatment and ultimately prevention”, the endemic societal challenges that result in a “decline in hope and purpose” are more difficult to address.
This decline in hope and purpose has many roots and is experienced differently around the world. Robinson discusses the economic system in which “ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures . . . [has] fallen away in eager deference to profitability.” Others have also analysed the intersections of economics and politics to explain the “snare in which humanity is caught”. Yet as Robinson insists, there are options suddenly open to us that would have been unthinkable six months ago. Now that the “imaginary walls have fallen,” she says, “we can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want . . .”
* Full article available in printed copies.
Linda Hogan
is Professor of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin.