Everyone deplores the state of our modern prisons. But grim though they are, they are a great deal better than, say, those in Peru or Indonesia. In any case they are, ironically, enough the product of 19th Century Christian-inspired reform. The move to abolish the death penalty in part or totally has for many made…
Peter Costello
The Faith in Scotland’s Western Highlands
When Dr John Watts was asked if he would write a history of the Diocese of Argyle and the Isles since its restoration as a Catholic diocese in 1878, he quickly realised that to make full sense, to extract the fullness of the history of the Faith in the highlands and islands, he would have…
Visions of Knock
The 135th anniversary of the visions at Knock, which falls on August 21, has brought into focus the whole question of visions, apparitions and the Church’s attitude towards such private revelations, and to Marian traditions as a whole. Knock is now numbered among the most famous visionary sites in the world, along with Lourdes…
Irish Catholic Catechism for Adults
Irish Episcopal Conference, (Veritas, €24/£19.99)
Our forgotten debt to Babylon
Looking at the Middle East as “the cradle of Christianity”
The living insights of the Church Fathers
The Beauty of God’s Presence in the Fathers of the Church.
Summer time and the reading is plenty
A selection for summer reading
Chestnut Street
A last look round the Binchy estate so to speak in this set of tales concerning the varied residents of Chestnut Street, which readers of Minding Frankie will recall is just around the corner from St Jarlath’s Crescent. These are warm and entertaining tales of the kind of suburban life which was very much Maeve…
Northanger Abbey
This is a ‘reimagining’ of the Jane Austen novel, the second in a series. This may seem a strange sort of project, but the result, with the abbey now set in the Scottish Borders, a far cry from the genteel settings of Jane Austen’s original. But this novel too is great fun, which indeed is…
The Miniaturist
This is a debut novel, but one which has been widely praised for its atmospheric treatment of the theme. The Dutch interiors, so familiar from paintings, here become the setting in the house and in the miniature doll’s house version of it, the setting for a playing out of the injunction of St Luke that…