A Hundred Roads to Here: Introductions to Meditation by Donagh O’Shea OP (Dominican Publications, €12.00 / £10.50) This is a book which will have I think an immediate appeal to those who are attracted to the idea of mediation, but have somehow failed to get the knack of it. Donagh O’Shea is fully alert to their…
We Are Saved Only Together. Living in the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement by Colin Miller, foreword by Seth Haines (Ave Maria Press, €19.50 / £16.30 / US $ 17.95) The parable of the Good Samaritan is surely the best known of Jesus’ parables. It is among the most easily understood:…
Reforming Galway: Civic society, religious change and St Nicholas collegiate church, 1550-1750 by Raymond Gillespie (Four Courts Press, €50.00 / £45.00) Raymond Gillespie, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maynooth, died in March of this year, while this book was in the very final stages of production. Reforming Galway is thus the last work of a…
The Restructuring of Irish Dioceses edited by Eugene Duffy (Dominican Publications, €20.00 / £17.50) This book, the publishers explain, “provides a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the challenges facing the Catholic Church. The boundaries of Ireland’s 26 dioceses, unchanged since the 12th century, no longer reflect the distribution of the Catholic population.” But such demographic change…
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalisation Began by Valerie Hansen (Viking / Penguin, £20.00 / €23.50) Having been reared on the idea, common enough in the 19th century and later, that the year 1000 was rife with fears of an imminent Day of Judgement, I was a little surprised to read…
The Irish in the Resistance: The untold stories of the ordinary heroes who resisted Hitler by Clodagh Finn and John Morgan (Gill Books, €15.99 / £13.99) Ireland was neutral in World War 11 but as a concession to embattled Britain, Taoiseach Eamon de Valera did not prevent Irish citizens from enlisting in the British forces. But…
The Return of the White Canons: The Modern Norbertines in Britain by Aidan Nichols (Gracewing, £12.99 / €14.99) Aidan Nichols is a Dominican friar, with a special interest in ecumenism, who has an established reputation as a writer on Catholic theology and culture. His latest book concerns the revival of the White Canons, the Canons Regular…
Jerusalem Through the Ages: From its Beginnings to the Crusades by Jodi Magness (Oxford University Press, £30.99/€36.50) Author Jodi Magness is a distinguished archaeologist at the height of her career who specialises in ancient Palestine from its beginnings up the Middle Ages. Over several years she had to be persuaded to write this book, but many…
Brando – The Fun Side by Aubrey Malone (Bear Manor Media, €32.95) Famously we are advised by Monty Python to look on the bright side of life. And so we ought to. But the bright side of Marlon Brando? He made his first impact as an actor playing a sullen angry young man in films that…
Irish Doctors in the Second World War by PJ Casey, KT Cullen, and JP Duignan (Merrion Press, €29.99/£25.99) This is a comprehensive account of the Irish doctors who served with the Allied forces in World War II. This is for all intents and purposes an untold story, but one that needed to be told for…
Peter Costello