Chaplains: Ministers of Hope ed by Alan Hilliard, with a foreword by Bishop Eamonn Walsh (Messenger Publications, €19.95/£18.95) Unheard Voices: Reflections of a prison chaplain by Imelda Wickham PBVM, foreword by Peter McVerry SJ (Messenger Publications, €12.95/£11.95) Our attitudes to chaplains may well depend on our own experiences. One of my brothers, who lived in…
Finding Peace compiled by Sister Stan (Columba Books, €16.99 / £14.50) A reader opening this book is likely to turn first out of curiosity to those entries by public figures such as the party leaders of the Government and opposition: this is worth reading, and recalling perhaps on future occasions, such as at the time of…
Joy in the Good: Rekindling an Inner Fire by Joachim Hartmann SJ and Annette Clara Unkelhäußer (Messenger Publication, €12.95 / £11.20) On first picking up this book I was taken by a sentence in the blurb: “We overlook the rich and complementary relationship between silence and communication. In silence we can rediscover the gift of…
The Doré Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy by Gustave Dore (Dover Art Library, £12.99) Gustave Doré (1832-1883): Master of Imagination Hardcover by Erika Dolphin and others (Flammarion, £31.96) William Blake: Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, the Complete Drawings edited by Sebastian Schutze (Taschen, £29.00) Four centuries ago Italy, indeed the whole of Christian Europe, was absorbing the news that the…
The Celtic Myths that Shape the Way We Think by Mark Williams (Thames & Hudson, £20.00/$23.99) This book ought to have a wide readership for it explores an area of modern literature that has, since the mid-Victorian era, exerted great influence over writers, artists and filmmakers in these islands. Mark Williams was born in London and…
If these stones could speak: The history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland through twenty buildings by Peter Stanford (Hodder & Stoughton, £20.00/€24.00) I have long found the books of Peter Stanford – a former editor of the Catholic Herald – no matter what their topic (he writes mostly about religion, history and ethics) to be always entertaining…
This is the second book by NUI academics Prof. Breslin and Dr Buckley in which they use advanced computer technology to “restore”, or rather add natural colour tones to photographs enlivening the original monochrome. I have my doubts about this technique, as have many historians and photographers. But looking through these pages I found images of…
The Book of St Brigid by Colm Keane and Una O’Hagan (Capel Island Press, €14.99/£15.00) The names of the author will be well-known to readers, for many of their books have been popular bestsellers. They have a knack, derived perhaps from their days in television, of making what they write accessible, vivid and immediate to a wide…
Divine Diamond: Facets of the Fourth Gospel by Kevin O’Gorman SMA (Messenger Publications, €14.95/£12.95) The writings attributed to St John the Apostle have long stood out in contrast to the synoptic gospels. Indeed there were those who thought that the apocalypse of St John of Patmos attributed to the same author should not be added to…
The World of Books By the books editor This year France is marking, in various ways and styles, the bicentenary of the death of Napoléon Bonaparte. In the cause of heritage preservation the emperor has joined the Bourbons as part of the great panoply of French culture. The current head of the family, international investment banker Jean-Christophe,…