Ancient Celtic Christianity and its Uses and Abuses Today

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Theology - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, University of Education Freiburg im Breisgau, language: English, abstract: Celtic sells. If you look into a British bookstore or type in the word 'Celt' or 'Celtic' into an internet search machine, you will find thousands of matches. I did the test and typed the words 'Celtic' and afterwards 'Jesus Christ' into Google. Google came up with approximately 82.500.000 matches for 'Celtic' and only 58.300.000 for 'Jesus Christ'. Many of the links belong to Celtic music bands or Celtic arts, but still a big amount leads to Celtic Spirituality pages. What is it that makes Celtic Spirituality so immensely popular today? What are people looking for when they buy Celtic Christian resource and prayer books, register with Celtic Christian web communities or seek out churches that offer 'Celtic services'? And the most important question of all - Does the 'Celtic Boom' have anything to do with Christianity or is it some kind of New Age mysticism? Let us have a look at ancient Celtic Christianity and then find out to what extent so-called modern Celtic Christian still share the same ideas, traditions and practices.