This year the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats is being celebrated with a wide range of events and media occasions. Yeats is one of those poets that school anthologies have made familiar, and yet remain strangely powerful in their resonances. Here are some thoughts on a man who is arguably Ireland’s…
Peter Costello
The Fractured Creation Debate
Creationism is not a topic widely talked about in Ireland. It rarely intrudes into the public debate. But creationism presents both a false view of religion and of science. Seeming to reassure people it dangerously misleads them. It will be recalled that when the visitor centre at the Giant’s Causeway was opened a few years…
The Scriptures in the modern world
Holy Bible: New International Version large print edition (Hodder & Stoughton, €28.99) God’s Smuggler: One Man’s Mission to Change the World by Brother Andrew with John and Elizabeth Sherrill (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99)
Oscar Romero: The life and influence of a modern martyr
Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, in El Salvador, was shot to death by a sniper on the altar of the chapel of the Divine Providence hospital where he was celebrating evening Mass on March 24, 1980. This was done by agents of the state who were never brought to trial. In his life Oscar…
Wisdom from the Orient
Guest from the West: Lessons for the West from a Lifetime in the East by Hugh MacMahon (Original Writing, €15.00 pb; ISBN: 978-1-78237-849-5)
Bring back organic children
Cotton Wool Kids: What’s making Irish parents paranoid? by Stella O’Malley (Mercier Press, €14.99)
Walking back to happiness
Walking the Camino along the north shore of Spain to Santiago de Compostela has become perhaps the most active pilgrim route in the world. All kinds of people undertake the excursion, not all of them Christians by any means. This very personal book is an account of one such by a Catholic woman from Wexford,…
An exceptional man
The recent attacks on young men with intellectual disabilities in Cork and in Dublin, have received great deal of media attention, and rightly so. But the true nature of what “learning disabilities means” often escapes them. Ruth Chipperfield will enlighten them. This is truly the story of an exceptional man, her brother Gordon Cochran, exceptional…
The false glamour of cook books
World of books by the books editor
What Jesus wrote in the dust: the life and poetry of John F. Deane
Give Dust a Tongue: A Faith & Poetry Memoir by John F. Deane (The Columba Press, €19.99)