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The Patrick of St. Patrick's Day
One of the greatest achievements of the tourist board in the Republic of Ireland is the annual St. Patrick’s Festival. Begun in 1996, the Festival attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to what is by far Ireland’s biggest annual celebration. The five day-celebration turns Dublin city-centre into a colourful, open-air circus, with carnivals, cavalcades, giant computer screens, and Ireland’s biggest firework display. Streets, cafés, pubs, decked in green bunting and ‘Paddy’s Day’ paraphernalia, are thronged as Dublin is packed to capacity with revellers.
Why bother with orthodoxy?
The major assumption behind Dan Brown’s best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, was that there were rival forms of Christianity in the earliest Christian centuries and these expressions of Christianity were all equally valid until one particular form (the one that insisted on the deity of Jesus) became triumphant due to the political power of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Whilst Dan Brown’s novel reconstruction has been rightly dismissed as fiction, nevertheless, it is true that there were many different groups in these centuries who were claiming to be Christian, but whose teachings were far from the teachings of the Apostles and the New Testament. According to Gerald Bray in his book, Creeds, Councils and Christ (IVP, 1984, page 96), creeds therefore arose in response to a pastoral need to define the faith in a memorable summary fashion in an age of theological confusion.
Ireland - Mission Impossible?
‘Your mission should you choose to accept it…’is the well-known line from the ‘Mission Impossible’ series of films, starring the American actor Tom Cruise. In the films, our hero, Ethan Hunt, takes on almost impossible odds to achieve his mission. With lots of twists and turns in the plot along the way, he eventually achieves what he set out to do and his short-term mission is accomplished.In real life, our mission as Christians may not be so death-defying and explosively spectacular as Ethan Hunt’s, but it does begin with the same challenge: ‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it…’ In fact, strictly speaking, it’s not our mission – it’s God’s. Christians are challenged to take up God’s mission in the world. Unlike the ‘Mission Impossible’ films, it’s no short-term challenge: it’s a life-time challenge of following the Lord Jesus Christ faithfully and bringing his message to the world.
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