The funeral took place today of Mr Jack Dickson , formerly Director of Education for Co Armagh and Chief Officer of the Southern Education and Library Board. Mr Dickson will be most remembered as the author of the Dickson Plan for schools in the Craigavon area.
A meeting was held today between the Church of Ireland Legislation & Politics Committee (NI) and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Rt Hon Paul Murphy, MP, in Church of Ireland House, Belfast.
This afternoon we gather in Clogher and in St Macartan’s Cathedral in remembrance of those who in two World Wars and by extension in the troubled warfare which has seared our own country over more than thirty years have given their lives in the service of others for the cause of freedom and that elusive word peace. We do so in a spirit of remembrance and thanksgiving. We are upheld in hope by the promise of God the Father that hurt and destruction do not last for ever; we are supported here in life by the compassion of God the Son who wept both for his friend Lazarus and for the city of Jerusalem; we are strengthened in our own service of the community by God the Spirit who gives us a vision of God dwelling with us as his people in a new creation. This vision draws into the embrace of God the hurt and the destruction, the compassion and the forgiveness, the old and the new in a free flow of love between God Father, Son and Holy Spirit and his people, his children, the people of the new earth who are God’s own children. And, I say, we do so in a spirit of remembrance.
The Millennium Forum in Londonderry is the venue for a major Church of Ireland diocesan presentation, Derry and Raphoe, Let’s Go! on Saturday afternoon, 8 November.
The death took place on Sunday 2 November of Archdeacon Desmond Hilton Patton, formerly Archdeacon of Ossory & Leighlin and Chaplain to the Mageough Home. (1978-88)
The RCB Library’s Assistant Archivist, Dr Susan Hood, has completed her three-week tour of book signings and lectures in New York, following engagements in the cities of Boston, the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, and Chicago. The principal focus of the tour was to promote her book Royal Roots - Republican Inheritance: the Survival of the Office of Arms which tells the remarkable survival story of the Irish heraldic authority.
The narrator of Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, begins his task by speculating as to whether there might be such a thing as ‘a showy dark crack running down the middle of a life’. He decides that there is indeed such a thing, and that in his case this dark crack is what he describes as “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”. But is that a flaw at all? Having just returned from a few days in the city of Florence, I am in neither the position nor the mood to suggest that there is anything unpleasant or dark or even necessarily flashy about the picturesque!
Following the success of last year's Bible Week, the four main church leaders, Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Methodist and Presbyterian are planning a series of open and ecumenical meetings in Ballina Parochial Centre, by St. Muredach's Cathedral, Ballina. All will be most welcome.
The Bishop of Meath & Kildare, Dr Richard Clarke, will give the address at Citizenship Service in Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral on Sunday 2 November 2003 at 11.00 am