The Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region may seem almost irrelevant to many Irish Catholics: sure, Pope Francis talks often of growth in the Church coming from the peripheries, but there are peripheries and there are peripheries. Austen Ivereigh’s commonwealmagazine.org piece ‘When the Amazon meets the Tiber’ should help banish such scepticism, working well…
A recurring line from the Twilight Zone movie came back to me last week: “You want to see something really scary?” Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal (BBC4) over the last two Thursdays made for very scary viewing. We’re familiar with eugenics, pure race theory and the like from Nazi ideology, but the programmes showed that the seeds…
A History of the Irish Red Cross by Shane Lehane (Four Courts Press, €45.00) Following the estab-lishment of the Red Cross in Geneva in 1863, the British branch was founded in 1870 as the ‘British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War’ and reconstituted as the British Red Cross in…
Judy (12A) “If I’m a legend,” Judy Garland said once, “why am I so lonely?” Maybe that was precisely why. “I was born,” she said, “at the age of 12 on the MGM lot.” A tendency towards weight gain caused Louis B. Meyer to put her on a punishing regime of slimming tablets. An addiction…
Many saints have written on spirituality or theology. But few have been what John Henry Newman was, a writer by vocation, the author of lasting works in a wide variety of genres. The seeds of his sainthood, indeed the full flowering of his sainthood, are to be found in his writings, the whole range of…
Sister Wendy’s 100 Best-loved Paintings compiled by Sr Wendy Beckett (SPCK, £25.00) This is both the latest and the last book of the celebrated TV art critic, Sr Wendy Beckett, who died last Christmastide at the age of 88, on the feast of St Stephen. She was not, as many seemed to think, a nun…
A Personal Perspective on Irish PEN by J Anthony Gaughan (Kingdom Books, €15.00) PEN was an international association of writers founded in London in 1921 – the initials stood for ‘Poets, Essayists and Novelists’, but in fact many kinds of writers are now members. The club, as its members thought of it, was intended to…
Relatively soon after the re-unification of Germany in 1990 I made my first visit to Dresden, capital of the eastern state of Saxony. Although part of a group I extricated myself to attend two performances at the city’s famous Semper Opera House – Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which had its première in the Semper in 1845 and…
Fall and Rise: the story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff (HarperCollins, £25.00) Felix M. Larkin Not very often do I read a book that I know will live forever in my memory. This is one such book. It tells the stories of a few of the victims of the terrorist attacks in America on September…
Some weeks ago I was lucky enough to be present in England’s New Forest for my god-daughter’s first profession as a Dominican sister. Her community, the Dominican Sisters of St Joseph, is a remarkable group of women – warm, supportive, fun, energetic, contemplative and evangelical – and very much a case study in G.K. Chesterton’s…
Greg Daly
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello