Anyone seeking a serious and well informed account of vaudou can consult Les mysteres du vaudou, translated as Voodoo: The Search for the Spirit (Thames & Hudson / New Horizons, €14.70 / £9.75), by the Haitian sociologist Laënenc Hurbon, a trained Catholic theologian, who is now a Haitian academic. May Deren’s The Divine Horsemen (published in London…
time forgot Anne Heffernan (Buy the Book and other online resources, €15.00 / £13.50) Anne Heffernan is an Irish journalist with wide local experience, but the year she passed as a volunteer aid worker in a remote area of the Republic of Haiti was quite beyond her expectations. She flew out from Ireland by…
The Glenstal Prayerbook: A Benedictine Book of Prayer (Red Stripe Press, €14.99 / £13.00) Back in 2001 the first form of the Glenstal Prayerbook, then published by Columba Press, was a great popular success. It brought the old established prayer tradition of the Benedictine order out of the monastery and into the hands of…
Conversations in the Spirit: A Guide to the Synodal Method Juan A. Guerrero Alaves SJ & Oscar Martin López SJ, with a prologue by Pope Francis, translated by Austen Ivereigh Messenger Publications, €14.95 / The cover image of this book in a certain way sums up the idea behind the book as a whole. Through…
The Doré Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy Search Press, £19.00 / €20.50 Gustave Doré (1832-1883), a cradle Catholic born in the conflicted city of Strasbourg, was an artist whose anxious imagination was suffused with an engagement with the supernatural on many levels. Some years ago, I think in 2006, my wife and I on a visit…
Finding Mangan: The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet Bridget Hourican Gill Books, €22.99 / £17.50 James Clarence Mangan was not always destined to be Ireland’s ‘national poet’. That place at that time in the 1830s had been long and largely filled by Thomas Moore. Today Moore has a large and challenging statue…
Maynooth College Reflects on the Catechesis in the Life of the Church, edited by Jeremy Corley, Andrew Meszaros & John-Paul Sheridan, foreword by Bishop Michael Duignan (Messenger Publications, €14.95 / £12.95) This book consists of some 18 papers by writers directly associated for the most part with Maynooth College, and as such it represents…
Casimir Markievicz: A Polish Artist on Bohemian Dublin (1903-1913) An exhibition in the State Apartments of Dublin Castle, runs to September 14 2025; Co-produced by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland and the Office of Public Works. Entrance fee, €3.00; catalogue, €5.00. Count Markievicz, the Polish husband of the redoubtable Constance Gore-Booth, was an artist…
Year in the Woods: Montalto through the Seasons, by Paul Clements (Merrion Books, €18.99/ £17.99) Our relations with the natural world have provided a theme which has engaged people of spirit and sensibility since writing began almost, but certainly in the last few centuries. In receiving this book for review the title at once…
Here in Ireland the recovery in 1993 of a Caravaggio painting from the wall of the dining room of the Jesuit residence in Leeson Street, Dublin, made us all very conscious of this extraordinary artist of the Baroque period. That painting, The Taking of Christ, from 1602, now has a home in the National Gallery, where…