A Gospel of Hope by Walter Brueggemann (Hodder and Stoughton, £12.99) As we get ready to mark the end of the First World War, the Great War as it was then called, and the war to supposedly save civilisation, many will be recalling that the treaty that concluded that appalling conflict was the source, within a…
Homily Hints and Prayers: Daily Mass Reading by Silvester O’Flynn (Columba Books, €19.99) In the blurb of this quite large book there is a striking little phrase: “Where there is no priest available, this book would be an invaluable help to any group who gathers to pray with the day’s Mass Reading.” Now this may seem…
Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting by Laura Kelly Fanucci (Veritas, €12.99) Author Laura Fanucci, a hardworking American mother and theologian, places as an epigraph to her little book a saying of St Francis of Assisi: “It was easy to love God in all that was beautiful. The lessons of deeper knowledge, though, instructed me…
The Little Book of Dog Quotes edited by Aubrey Malone (Barzipan Publishing, £8.95) The world is divided, as we all know, into cat people and dog people. Being myself a dog person, I found this little book amusing. The world, according to P.G. Wodehouse, is divided into those who can stop a dog fight and those who…
National Gallery of Ireland Print Gallery Drawing Dublin exhibition curated by Anne Hodge (Curator of Prints and Drawings) and Niamh MacNally (Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings) The three rooms of the Print Gallery in the NGI are currently devoted to a most interesting exhibition, one filled with unusual and little seen images of the…
Achill: The Island poems by John F. Deane, paintings by John Behan (Currach Press, €19.99 /£14.99) John F. Deane is that rarity, a modern Irish poet deeply inspired in his poetry by what he calls in his introduction “the wonders of the Christian faith”. He himself was born on Achill Island in 1943, and his childhood…
Mystics: the beauty of prayer by Craig Larkin SM (Columba Press, €12.99) This is book was originally published two years ago in New Zealand under the title Inner Music: Living a Life in God. The title of the splendid new Irish edition gives a better idea perhaps of what the book contains – short essays on…
The Rivers of Dublin, new revised edition by Clair L. Sweeney, revised by Gerard O’Connell & Michael Curtis (Dublin City Council / Irish Academic Press, €24.99) There is a lovely saying, by an unidentified street poet, that has long echoed in my mind, as a description of the modern city: “The fields lie dreaming underneath.” No…
Why We Go to Mass, a comic book by Fr. Pat Seaver & Hugh McMahon (€5.99 postage included; for copies contact Paul Flynn at Kyle House, Henry St, Limerick, tel: 061-313377) Having to sit on so many Sundays to sit beside families with their small children, even some of communion age, are running around the aisles,…
World of Books by the Books Editor The other day emerging from my oculists in Grafton Street, I was trying out my new distance glasses. Coming towards me down Nassau Street was a No. 11 bus, bound for ‘Wadelai Park’. Thankfully I could see this quite clearly, but it set my memory going, for…