A Love Surpassing Knowledge: The Spirituality of Edward King, by Michael Marshall, with a foreword by Archbishop Stephen Cottrell (Gracewing, £14.99) Gracewing for over 30 years has been providing books that explore aspects of Catholicism. But now they are broad minded enough editorially to find Catholicism outside the Catholic Church. Victorian Britain was the era…
Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?, by Timothy Keller (Hodder & Stoughton, £10.00/€12.99) On May 19 this year, Pastor Timothy Keller died at his Manhattan home of pancreatic cancer. He was the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, and a widely read best-selling Christian writer. He did not care to…
Quiet Times with God Devotional, by Joyce Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton, £10.00/€12.99) The daily round that we all plan is all too often disrupted by the simple fact that people can so easily communicate and that hour you set aside to make a cake or finally do something about that drain before winter is too…
This year we were told that Halloween was less commercial than past years. This was not my impression, at least in our South Dublin neighbourhood. Having taken my afternoon walks around some of the nearby streets, I was surprised at how early and how generously some of the houses had been decorated. All the usual things…
Sir John Lavery is the sort of painter that people think they have a very clear and exact impression of, based largely on his early society portraits and the many important pieces he produced during Ireland’s revolutionary period, which ended with an image of his wife leaning on a harp gracing the new currency notes of the emergent Irish state.
We live in a strange world in which it is possible for a young person to have an extraordinarily intimate relationship with someone of the other side of the world, and still know nothing of the old lady next door, and never speak to her. Screen to screen is the order of the day, person to person more difficult.
This title was pointed out before Christmas last year, as I recall, as a delightfully entertaining introduction to some of the great heroes and ordinary characters of the Bible, told in a story telling style with a particular appeal to modern young readers.
Lydia: A Story, by Paula Gooder (Hodder and Stoughton, £9.99 /€11.99) Lydia is a person who appears briefly in the account of St Paul’s second missionary journey. She was a seller of purple cloth – in the 1st Century a luxury item – an apparently insignificant person in life. But in a longer perspective she…
The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East, by Janine di Giovanni (Bloomsbury, £10.99 /€12.99) The author of this most moving book, now a senior Fellow and professor at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, has been described “as one our generation’s finest correspondents”. This book alone illustrates her skill, insight and compassion.…
Journey to the Light: Daily Readings through Advent and Christmas, by John Mann, foreword by Bishop Brendan Leahy (Messenger Publications, €12.95 /£11.95) Advent and Christmas 2023, from the website of Sacred Space (Messenger Publications, €7.95 / £6.95) Every year it has been customary for everyone to complain about Christmas “coming too soon”, as a…