Mary in Different Traditions: Seeing the Mother of Jesus with New Eyes by Thomas G. Casey SJ (Messenger Publications, €9.95/£8.95) This is a small book that explores some big issues. Author Casey begins by noting the shift of emphasis over the last generations in the way Catholics perceive Our Lady. Marian devotions, which it has…
Glimpses of the Gospels: Theological, Spiritual & Practical reflections by Jack Mahoney SJ (Messenger Publications, €12.95 / £11.95) Every week – for a few, every day – Catholics hear a gospel reading at Mass. As these readings are arranged over the year along with extracts from the Old Testament and the Epistles, present a schema…
Social Life in Pre-Reformation Dublin 1450-1540 by Peadar Slattery (Four Courts Press, €45.00) Recently I was involved, in quite another capacity, in raising money for the purchase for the Trinity College Research collections of a fugitive manuscript from St Mary’s Abbey in Dublin, liquidated at the time of the Reformation. This brought to my…
Glenstal Abbey through the seasons with photographs by Valerie O’Sullivan, edited by Colman Ó Clabaigh OSB (Columba Books, €24.99) Through pictures and text this beautiful book captures the life of one of Ireland’s most famous abbeys. At the heart of it all is an annual round of worship, prayer and reflection. But this is also…
Mainly about books by the books editor St Mary’s Abbey in Dublin was founded, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, in 846. Over the coming centuries it in grew in size into an important ecclesiastical institution, eventually holding the country’s largest library. The nature of such places began to change with the arrival…
Defending Trinity College Dublin, Easter 1916: Anzacs and the Rising by Rory Sweetman (Four Courts Press, €19.99) Dr Rory Sweetman is a Kildare-born New Zealander who studied at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University, and has has written extensively on aspects of the Irish abroad. He is the author of Bishop in the Dock: the…
A Perfect Peace: Newman Saint for Our Time by Bishop Fintan Monahan (Veritas, €7.99) Newman: A short Biography by Michael Collins(Messenger Publications, €9.95) The canonisation of John Henry Newman last Sunday had brought his life and spirituality before a great many people who were perhaps only vaguely aware of their true complexity. Many of these…
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography by Carlos Eire (Princeton University Press, £21.00) The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila is a rightly famous book, and remains widely read. But the title is slightly misleading, for the text was composed not at the free volition of the saint herself, but at the insistence…
Many saints have written on spirituality or theology. But few have been what John Henry Newman was, a writer by vocation, the author of lasting works in a wide variety of genres. The seeds of his sainthood, indeed the full flowering of his sainthood, are to be found in his writings, the whole range of…
Sister Wendy’s 100 Best-loved Paintings compiled by Sr Wendy Beckett (SPCK, £25.00) This is both the latest and the last book of the celebrated TV art critic, Sr Wendy Beckett, who died last Christmastide at the age of 88, on the feast of St Stephen. She was not, as many seemed to think, a nun…