The World of Books by the Books Editor Recently a friend of mine asked me what the visitation of the Black Death to Ireland at the end of the 1340s was like. He was wondering how it compared to the present Covid-19 infection. Actually, a very vivid record exists: it was first printed coincidently in…
The last hope filled messages of Daniel O’Leary Horizons of Hope: Unpublished Fragments of Love by Daniel O’Leary (Columba Books, €19.99/£17.99) The cosmos as revealed by modern science is one of the subjects that theologians avoid if they can. That vast expanse of time and change is just too difficult to fit into a religious scheme…
No More Time by Greg Delanty (Louisiana State University Press, $17.95/£16.50/€19.99; order from www.eurospangroup.com) “Merritt Island, Florida, was flooded in order to eradicate mosquitoes around the Kennedy Space Centre, destroying this sparrow’s only nesting ground.” The sparrow in question is the Dusky seaside sparrow. But this observation which introduces one of Greg Delanty’s poems sums it all…
The World of Books by the Books Editor Some weeks ago there was a certain amount of fuss both in Britain and in Ireland about the 60th anniversary of Coronation Street, which first went out on television on December 9, 1960. Bear in mind that the first broadcasts from Montrose only came a year later. So…
Faith after Doubts: Why your beliefs stopped working and what to do about it by Brian McLaren (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99/€19.50) I was greatly impressed by this book, and at the start of my review I would like to make quite clear that this is a book that anyone who wishes to understand the nature of…
These days we hear a great deal about the decline of the classics, especially from those of a traditionalist and conservative outlook. And certainly the literature of the Greeks and Romans provided for centuries models of all kinds: of nobility, and authoritarian rule, of lyric poetry and epic, of morality and courage. In the last…
The World of Books by the Books Editor Any one of my generation who was taught from an early age by the good nuns will have somewhere tucked away in the back attic of their memories Hilaire Belloc’s poem Courtesy. Those ineffable lines: Of Courtesy it is much less Than Courage of Heart or Holiness.…
At the turn of the year The Irish Catholic, along with other long-established national newspapers, has customarily devoted space to items from the year end release of state documents from 30 years ago by our National Archives in Bishop Street, Dublin. This usually ran to a mini-supplement of six pages. But this year, because of the…
Paddy Cole: King of the Swingers by Paddy Cole with Tom Gilmore. Foreword by John McColgan (O’Brien Press, €19.99/ebook €9.99) It is amazing how ‘the little bit of religion’ creeps into strange places sometimes. These are the music-making memories of a leading figure in the music scene since the 1950s. Paddy Cole is a great tale…
The Gentle Saint: A pilgrimage to Oxford, Dublin and Rome in the Footprints of Saint John Henry Newman by Patricia O’Leary (Gracewing, £12.99) To many readers Patricia O’Leary will be a familiar name, as she contributed a column to this newspaper for some 14 years. By metier a Cork-based journalist, she also studied catechetics and scripture at…