Jesus Through Muslim Eyes by Richard Shumack (SPCK, £12.99) The other day, before I started on Jesus Through Muslim Eyes, I read in a 1957 book of travels through North Africa from Tunis to Cairo that in Beja, a remote village near the Libyan-Tunisian border, the mosque was dedicated to Jesus Christ. It surprised the author…
Really Rotten Rhymes poems by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, illustrations by Alice Coleman (Mercier Press, €14.99/£13.99) This is a book filled with the rude vitality of childhood, with equal measures of both qualities. It makes a wonderful read for those who have children still around them, or can remember anything at all of their own early years. This…
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph (Simon & Schuster, $30.00/£18.99) Frank Litton In 2015, Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of the United States’ Congress. He invoked the memory of famous Americans: “The complexities of history not withstanding, these men and women for all their many differences and…
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by T. J. Clark (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) British-born writer T. J. Clark is a Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His main field of interest has been 19th-Century French art, and such artists as Manet and Courbet, so this…
On Marriage, On Birth, On Death (three titles in the series “How to Find God”) by Timothy and Kathy Keller (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99) In this time of peril and stress, when Covid-19 continues to spread across the benighted nations of Africa, many are faced very directly with question of what it is they believe and…
With the assistance of galleries around the world, the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome has mounted a magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime show, celebrating the youthful yet astonishingly mature genius of Raphael, who died in 1522 at the ridiculously early age of 37. Masterpieces which would have taken years of travelling to see, have been brought together. The…
Theology and Ecology in Dialogue: The Wisdom of Laudato Si’ by Dermot A. Lane, with a foreword by Seán McDonagh SCC (Messenger Publications, €19.95/£17.95) This year marks the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’s dramatic and historic encyclical Laudato Si’. It is being marked by the publication here in Ireland of a book exploring the document’s significance…
Medieval Philosophy (A History of Philosophy without any Gaps) by Peter Adamson (Oxford University Press, £25) When I discussed with a friend my intention of reviewing this tome – and tome it is, running to more than 600 closely printed pages – he wondered: “Are readers of The Irish Catholic interested in medieval philosophy?” Ignoring this…
The Sin of Certainty: Why God desires our trust more than our ‘correct’ beliefs by Peter Enns (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) Author Enns, who is a professor of Biblical Studies at a Pennsylvanian University, is a writer in the evangelical tradition. This book, though issued before the present plague descended on us, has interesting things to…
Journeys of Faith: Stories of Pilgrimage from Medieval Ireland by Louise Nugent (Columba Books, €26.99) This book is an epitome of a thousand years of Irish history, roughly 500 AD to 1500 AD. It is a reminder, if one is really needed, of just how important the context of history is to understanding present attitudes…