Christian juxtapositions: Peace in Northern Ireland
The Vision of Peace: Faith and Hope in Northern Ireland.
By Mareid Corrigan Maguire. Orbis, 123 pp.
People Behind the Peace: Community and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
By Ronald A Wells. Eerdmans, 128 pp.
Activist Mareid Corrigan Maguire's gathering of stories, letters, meditations and other occasional pieces is a fitting representation of her work. She is one of the founders of Northern Ireland's Peace People and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize. Northern Ireland's "troubles" were made violently personal for Maguire through the deaths of her two nephews and a niece in August 1976. The story of those deaths and the injury of her sister Anne, which Maguire recounts in the material gathered in this book, is an appropriate lens for viewing Ireland's troubled relationship with Britain. When a British army patrol shot and killed a 19-year-old IRA volunteer, his car crashed into a sidewalk in Belfast, killing Anne's children and leaving her seriously injured. Anne, who never recovered from the loss of her children, took her own life in January 1980.
