Dear Pope Francis: The Pope Answers Letters from Children Around the World by Pope Francis in conversation with Antonio Spadaro SJ (Messenger Publications / Jesuits in Ireland, €14.99) It is not unusual for recent Popes to be associated with books for children. We had, for instance, a rather charming book about Pope Benedict’s cat – cats…
My Indian Journal: Exploring Interfaith Connections by Catherine McCann (ISPCK, €8.00; ISBN 978-81-8465-529-2; available from Veritas, Dubray and Easons) They say that there are two ways to get to know the heart of a country: either make a brief intense visit, or spend a lifetime there. Anything in between may well leave one confused about the…
Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair by Anne Lamont (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99) In this wise little book, popular writer Anne Lamont draws on the now almost lost art of make and mend which our grandmothers so firmly believed in. A stitch in time can save not only that favourite garment, but also, she…
The Book of Margery Kempe translated and edited by Anthony Bale (Oxford World’s Classics, £8.99) In 1934 an extraordinary literary discovery was made in the library of an Old Catholic family in England. It was a medieval manuscript that had escaped the dissolution of the monasteries. Found in the Derbyshire home of the Butler-Bowdons, it had…
Protecting Mental Health by Dr Keith Gaynor(Veritas, €12.99) Mental health is an issue that affects every family in some way or another. Historians have traced out how the mentally ill were treated – or rather not treated – in the Georgian and Victorian periods. Today we can assume that treatments have improved, and yet, as…
The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe: Images, Objects and Practices ed. by Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan & Laura Katrine Skinnebach (Four Courts Press, €29.95) At one time we used to hear older people complaining that the changes brought about by Vatican II had brought an end to many of the devotional pictures…
The Passion and the Cross by Ronald Rolheiser (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99 hb) Lent approaches, and many will be looking round for a book which will provide them with reading during the weeks to Good Friday and Easter. For readers of this paper, and for the many other publications where his columns are syndicated around…
Soldiers of Christ: The Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar in Medieval Ireland ed. Martin Browne OSB and Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB (Four Courts Press, €50.00 hb) Ever since the controversy over The Da Vinci Code the Knights Templar have become a stock item in books from ‘alternative historians’ who have produced so many strange…
Augustine: Conversions and Confessions by Robin Lane Fox (Allen Lane, £30.00) In the history of Western civilisation St Augustine has a special place. Just how special many may not realise. In any academic library the works of the Greek and Latin Fathers in their original (say in the standard edition of Migne) occupy a great…
John Henry Newman: A Portrait in Letters edited by Roderick Strange (Oxford University Press, £30.00) Over the centuries biography has changed. When James Boswell published in 1791 his landmark life of Dr Samuel Johnson, he revealed that he had adapted the new method of Rev. William Mason in his life of Gray, in allowing the…