All Time Belongs to Him: Seasons and Feasts of the Lord, by Hugh Gilbert OSB (Gracewing, £20.00 / £23.99) This book is quite a contrast to the spiritual adventures of Ben Harrison. The author Hugh Gilbert OSB has been a Benedictine monk of Pluscarden Abbey near Elgin, in Moray in northern Scotland. This is,…
A Song for the Way, by Ben Harrison (Dominican Publications, €12.00 / £10.00) Over the years parts of this book have appeared as articles in journals, but being brought together here they provide readers new to the author’s work with a very vivid reading experience. In a strange way it recollects the Beat Generation…
The First World War Centenary Roll of Honour and Essays, edited by Ronan McGreevy and Emer Purcell, associate editor Tom Burnell, (National University of Ireland / Four Courts Press, €30.00 / £24.95) This is an important book, but of the kind that will be important to read not as a narrative, but to use for research…
A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne edited by Robert O’Byrne, (Messenger Publications, €25.00 / £17.99) This is the latest album of images to be culled from the astonishing Fr Francis Browne Collections; it is also by far the best. The images, derived directly from the digitalised negatives, are crisp and…
Highways and Byways: A European Pilgrimage. by Nicholas Schofield, (Gracewing, £15.99 / €18.99) The author Nicholas Schofield, aside from being a parish priest in Uxbridge, has also been an historian and antiquarian and a long time columnist of the Catholic Times. He has previously written Highways and Byways: discovering Catholic England. In this book spreads…
The recently completed restoration of Notre Dame in central Paris has absorbed the interest of so many people over the last five years that other such work in other places have been sadly overlooked. Central Paris gets millions of visitors each year; Palermo, the capital of the Island of Sicily, is less popular, for various…
In the new Programme for Government, which Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been labouring over with the rural independents, there is a curious omission. No provision is made for any official arrangements to mark the Bicentenary of the Catholic emancipation which falls in the summer of 2029. Given the huge volume of effort and…
Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat (Birlinn, £14.99 / €18.00) Edinburgh: The autobiography, edited by Alan Taylor (Birlinn, £20.00 / €24.00) I am always astonished when Dubliners extol the graces of Georgian Dublin, thinking to myself that they can never have seen Edinburgh to make such a statement. Undoubtedly the New Town of Edinburgh…
Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lenten Book, by Eric Varden (Bloomsbury Continuum, £12.99 / €15.50) Here we are, as I write on the sixth day of a New Year. Christmas is well past; but life and faith go on. This title is the first book addressed to Lent and Easter tide that has come to hand;…
Dreaming a New Dream: Conversations on the future of the Church in Ireland, by Jim Deeds, with a foreword by Julieann Moran (Messenger Publications, €9.95 / £8.95) The pastoral minister Jim Deeds will be familiar to many readers as the co-author with Brendan McManus of Discovering God in the Mess and its two follow-up titles. This is…