Making life choices with Ignatius Loyola

Trust Your Feelings: Learning how to Make Choices with Ignatius of Loyola,  by Nikolaas Sintobin SJ (Messenger Publications, €12.95/£11.95) This is the second of author Nikolaas Sintobin’s books to come to us for review. The first was warmly commended to readers, and this new title is quite as good as the first, and can also be…

34th International Hopkins Festival

July 22 to 28, Newbridge College Theatre, Newbridge Co. Kildare “A bright gem in the literary world!” according to Patrick Samway SJ, this year the 34th G. M. Hopkins Festival is to be held. This is a very real triumph of poetry, art and music over world-closing circumstances. Poet Desmond Egan, the founder and moving spirit…

Reaching out to those who have suffered loss

To Bring Comfort and Consolation: Bereavement Ministry,  by Paddy Shannon SJ, foreword by Bishop Donal McKeown (Messenger Publications, €14.99/£12.95) While our daily newspapers and television bring us continual news of war and disaster, our historians reinforce this state with multitudinous echoes of past loss and the toll it took. There are days when there seems…

The last words of Colm Keane 

Journey’s End: The Truth about Life after Death by Colm Keane (Capel Island Press (€14.99 / £12.99) In classical times some Greek philosophers likened the soul to a butterfly erupting from the very different chrysalis. The implication was that the “next life” of the human soul is likewise so different that it cannot be imagined…

The first, and last voyage of the Titanic

Travelling on Titanic with Father Browne by EE O’Donnell SJ, foreword by Dr Robert D. Ballard (Messenger Publications, €25.00 / 23.00) Published last week, to mark the 110th anniversary of the sinking of RMS Titanic, this evocative collection shows Frank Browne’s photographs taken on the leg of the ship’s maiden voyage from England to Queenstown.…

Exploring the iconic meaning of the image through which ‘God spoke to St Francis’

The San Damiano Cross: An Icon of the Crucifixion by Madeleine Stewart (Conard Press, €12.00 / £10.50; ISBN 978-1-9161432-0-3; orders to conardicons.com) Madeline Stewart, who is an accredited expert on icons and their interpretation lives in Northern Ireland, but mentally she is a well-travelled global person through her explorations of icons of the Orthodox tradition.…

New ways, and new demands for parish life

Becoming a Pastoral Parish Council: How to Make Your PPC Really Useful for the Twenty-First Century by Patricia Carroll, foreword by Archbishop Dermot Farrell (Messenger Publications, €9.95/£8.95) This is a short book, but intentionally so, for it is very much to its purpose which is to promote and encourage the emerging parish pastoral councils, which…