Trust Your Feelings: Learning how to Make Choices with Ignatius of Loyola, by Nikolaas Sintobin SJ (Messenger Publications, €12.95/£11.95) This is the second of author Nikolaas Sintobin’s books to come to us for review. The first was warmly commended to readers, and this new title is quite as good as the first, and can also be…
Sometimes you get a strong sense that mischief is afoot – that was certainly the case when I heard early last week that a draft of the US Supreme Court judgement on Roe v Wade had been leaked to the media. With leaks you have to figure out who benefits, and in this case the…
Cut glass accents, flowing gowns, tuxedoed toffs, billiard table lawns – it has to be Downton, doesn’t it? The 2019 feature went down a bomb with audiences. It had to be only a matter of time before a sequel hit the screen. Downton Abbey – A New Era (PG), penned again by Julian Fellowes and…
July 22 to 28, Newbridge College Theatre, Newbridge Co. Kildare “A bright gem in the literary world!” according to Patrick Samway SJ, this year the 34th G. M. Hopkins Festival is to be held. This is a very real triumph of poetry, art and music over world-closing circumstances. Poet Desmond Egan, the founder and moving spirit…
Burning the Big House: The story of the Irish country house in a time of war and revolution, by Terence Dooley (Yale University Press, £25.00/€30.00) The Anglo-Irish descendancy from the mid-19th century is the stuff of grand tragedy. Everywhere there are echoes of the elegiac. The men and women of the caste were relatively wealthy,…
UDR Declassified, by Micheal Smith (Merrion Press, €18.95/£14.50) The Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) was set up in late 1969 as the Ulster Special Constabulary (B Specials) was being disbanded as a result of its role in the sectarian violence which broke out in Derry and Belfast the previous August. Inevitably, large numbers of the B…
To Bring Comfort and Consolation: Bereavement Ministry, by Paddy Shannon SJ, foreword by Bishop Donal McKeown (Messenger Publications, €14.99/£12.95) While our daily newspapers and television bring us continual news of war and disaster, our historians reinforce this state with multitudinous echoes of past loss and the toll it took. There are days when there seems…
Journey Into Light: The Challenge and Enchantment of Catholic Christianity, by Roderick Strange (Hodder and Stoughton, €20.99/£16.99) In Journey Into Light, Msgr Roderick Strange sets himself quite a task – to convey The Challenge and Enchantment of Catholic Christianity, as the subtitle says, in little more than 200 pages. Measured against this ambition, the book…
I always get a pleasant sense of expectation when I hear of a new channel coming to the television or radio landscape. Last week saw the start of yet another TV News channel in the UK – Talk TV, (with much the same schedule as the existing Talk Radio), available on the usual platforms and…
This week’s NSO event at the National Concert Hall (tomorrow May 6) brings young Portuguese conductor – Joana Carneiro – to its rostrum for the first time. Her programme includes Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer with mezzo Tara Erraught and Stravinsky’s 1947 revised version of his ballet Petrushka. However, before these familiar and popular pieces…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Ruadhán Jones