Description

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Anti-Catholicism forms part of the dynamics to Northern Ireland's conflict and is critical to the self-defining identity of certain Protestants. However, anti-Catholicism is as much a sociology process as a theological dispute. It was given a Scriptural underpinning in the history of Protestant-Catholic relations in Ireland, and wider British-Irish relations, in order to reinforce social divisions between the religious communities and to offer a deterministic belief system to justify them. The book examines the socio-economic and political processes that have led to theology being used in social closure and stratification between the seventeenth century and the present day.

About the Author

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JOHN D. BREWER is Professor of Sociology at The Queen's University of Belfast. He was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University 1989, and St John's College, Oxford, 1992. He taught at the University of East Anglia and the University of Natal. He is the author and co-author of ten books, including Inside the RUC, After Soweto, Black and Blue, Crime in Ireland 1945-95, and Police, Public Order and the State (Macmillan) and editor of Can South Africa Survive and Restructuring South Africa, both with Macmillan. GARETH I. HIGGINS was Formerly Research Assistant in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, The Queen's University of Belfast, and is now doing doctoral research in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at Queen's on the myth of the anti-Christ in Northern Irish Protestantism.