From the Grand Canal to the Dodder: Illustrious Lives by Beatrice M. Doran The History Press, £20.00/€23.00 With the lifting of restrictions and the prospect of fine summer weather many people will be thinking of getting out and about in Dublin and elsewhere exploring localities and trying to find out about their past history and the…
Ignatian Spirituality and Interreligious Dialogue: Reading Love’s Mystery by Michael Barnes SJ (Messenger Publications, €24.95/£22.95) In medieval times there was a curious contrast between pilgrims to Jerusalem – whose minds were fixed on the Christian experience – and travellers such as Marco Polo, who went beyond Jerusalem and encountered on their explorations a great range of…
Naoibhein Ri Naomh Calum Cille/Nóibhéine Do Naomh Colm Cille/A Novena to Saint Columba by Fr Ross S. J. Crichton (Mungo Books/CTS, £3.95; ISBN 978-1-78469-658-0; bulk orders to Mungo Books, 6 Rob Roy Gardens, Kirkintilloch, Glasgow G661DQ) This little book marks a revival of the Mungo Books imprint, whose principal focus will be on publications of Scottish…
Maynooth College reflects on Covid-19: New Realities in Uncertain Times Ed. Jeremy Corley, Neil Xavier O’Donoghue and Salvador Ryan, foreword by Archbishop Eamon Martin (Messenger Publications, €9.95/£8.95) I write this on a morning when queues are forming outside Penney’s department store as people seek madly to mark what many are bound to see as the end…
The other week I was writing in these pages about the cultural meaning of the advent of printing in North America, which began not with the English puritans but with the Spanish clergy. This focused my mind on the fact that the national myths of the USA, but not of Canada or Mexico, manage to…
Walking with Ignatius by Arturo Sosa SJ, in conversation with Dario Menor, prologue by Sr Jolanta Kafka RMI (Messenger Publications, €19.95/£19.95) In conversation with a respected journalist, the Superior General of the Jesuits provides some reflections that will provide, so to speak, a theme for the ‘Ignatius 500 Year’ we are facing into. The key idea is that…
Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?: The World Facing the Pandemic. The Statio Orbis of March 27, 2020 by Pope Francis (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, €17.25; available through Knock Shrine Online Store) “For weeks now it has been evening. Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives,…
Maynooth: A College across Four Centuries edited by Salvador Ryan and John Paul Sheridan (Messenger Publications, €50.00/£40.00) This compilation of Maynoothiana has been prepared to celebrate the 225th anniversary of its foundation with a backward look or two at earlier events. It is the kind of book which the many thousands of those associated with Ireland’s…
Recently congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, US representative in Washington for Georgia’s 14 congressional district, a lady deep sunk in controversies of all kinds, raised a few more eye-brows by her reference to the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” on which “these United States” are raised. She is, of course, one of those who have in any case little…
The designation the other week by the United States of the massacres of Armenians in Asia Minor between 1915 and 1923 as genocide was an important step in satisfying the call for justice. But that particular passage of brutality was only one of many actions taken by the Ottoman Empire and the republican government of…