Mainly About Books By the books editor The current protests in the US and the Black Lives Matter campaign that has spread to other countries take my mind back a good way to what was, in effect, my first true contact with American culture. This was on a flight to New York (where a further…
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph (Simon & Schuster, $30.00/£18.99) Frank Litton In 2015, Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of the United States’ Congress. He invoked the memory of famous Americans: “The complexities of history not withstanding, these men and women for all their many differences and…
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by T. J. Clark (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) British-born writer T. J. Clark is a Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His main field of interest has been 19th-Century French art, and such artists as Manet and Courbet, so this…
In this series some of our literary collaborators will be giving suggestions for lockdown reading, books of all kinds to enlighten us and raise our spirits. This week: Christopher Moriarty on Charles Darwin’s fundamental belief in a Creator as expressed in his epoch making study The Origin of Species (1859) Millions of Christians to this…
The Arms Crisis of 1970: The plot that never was by Michael Heney (Head of Zeus, £20.00/€23.00) This important but controversial new book by Michael Heney, published recently in the midst of our present pandemic crisis, challenges the received historical interpretation of the attempt in 1970 to import arms for possible use in Northern Ireland. Rather…
On Marriage, On Birth, On Death (three titles in the series “How to Find God”) by Timothy and Kathy Keller (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99) In this time of peril and stress, when Covid-19 continues to spread across the benighted nations of Africa, many are faced very directly with question of what it is they believe and…
With the assistance of galleries around the world, the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome has mounted a magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime show, celebrating the youthful yet astonishingly mature genius of Raphael, who died in 1522 at the ridiculously early age of 37. Masterpieces which would have taken years of travelling to see, have been brought together. The…
In this series some of our literary collaborators will be giving suggestions for lockdown reading, books of all kinds to enlighten us and raise our spirits. This week Mary Kenny writes of John McGahern’s Amongst Women (1990), a novel of ordinary family life in provincial Ireland built around the life experiences of an embittered Republican…
The Outlaw Christ: The response in poetry to the question ‘Who do you say that I am?’ by John F. Deane (Columba Books, €16.99) Gabriel Fitzmaurice The Outlaw Christ, developed from a series of talks and lectures delivered by John F. Deane while he was the Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Catholic Studies at Loyola University, Chicago…
Thomas Finan, Collected Writings ed. D. Vincent Twomey (Columba Books, €34.99) Fran O’Rourke Reading this delightful collection, the word that repeatedly came to mind was the Latin for ‘wisdom’, sapientia, in its original meaning of ‘sweet knowledge’, knowledge to be savoured. As the editor Vincent Twomey notes, Thomas Finan’s primary draw was towards the sublime or…
Peter Costello
Mary Kenny