The Lent Factor: Forty Companions for the Forty days of Lent

Whenever the question of married priests, women in the Church or even women priests comes up, I often think of the wife of a Church of Ireland bishop, who remarked to me: “I often wonder about the enthusiasm of some Catholics for women in the Church. It’s not much fun being married to a priest.”…

For many people Viking Dublin and Protestant Georgian Dublin, thanks largely to the fierce controversies over the years about their preservation, are more familiar than the long intervening centuries of medieval Dublin, when the capital might be said to have been a truly Catholic though English speaking city. This book is a notable attempt to bridge…

His encounters with Christianity is one of the mysteries of Marco Polo

Pope Francis: Thoughts and Words for the Soul by Jorge Mario Bergoglio ed. by Giuseppe Costa (White Star Publishers, €12.28/£11.50)

The distinguished French novelist was a surprising choice for Nobel prize

Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays

The great artists and writers of today may well be, in part, names that are now totally unfamiliar or unknown to us

Here, in some 90,000 words, is the life story of popular broadcaster Donncha Ó Dúlaing from his first steps in life though some 50 years of entertaining people largely with tales and characters from the parishes of Ireland. But Donncha’s words are only part of it, for his book includes hundreds of photographs running over…

Steven Pinker, a professor in the psychology department of Harvard University, is known as the author of How the Brain Works, but much of his work is, in reality, devoted to language and expression, what he calls elsewhere “the stuff of thought”. The style of this book might suggest it was yet another mandarin book,…