Living Peace - Featured Articles
A History of Building Community through Publications
By Mary Kuiken, CSJP with Addendum by Jan Linley
The history of St. Joseph Messenger is a long and memorable one that had its roots in 1886 with the Congregation’s very first publication, The Dove of Ireland. It was a little paper issued every year in connection with the Union of Peace and Prayer, a network of prayer for peace in homes and families. The prayer network became the Pious Union of Prayer, uniting its members with the ministry and prayer of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. Margaret Anna Cusack, founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, was dedicated to the ministry of the written word and used her gift of writing to communicate the message of peace
History and Roots: Inserted Communities and Religious Commitment in Post-Conciliar Britain, 1970s-2000s
BY Dr. Carmen M. Magion
Hyson Green, a desperately impoverished area of Nottingham in the East Midlands of England, was, according to Andy Smart, a reporter for the Nottingham Evening Post, notorious for “crime, social unrest, poor housing and deprivation”. What was a “tight knit community” in back-to back terraced houses was replaced by the Hyson Green Flats (1965 1987), a “concrete jungle” of high-rise flats along a maze of corridors. Towards the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, recession and high unemployment due to downsizing by local employers and “globalisation” (manufacturing overseas) of the textile industry had taken its toll. Riots in July 1981, on Radford Road adjacent to the Flats, caused even further devastation to local homes and businesses. Referred to by locals as “Sing Sing” (after the maximum security prison in New York), Hyson Green, adjacent to a red light district, had a reputation as an undesirable neighbourhood beset by social problems.