The recent canonisation by Pope Francis of St John Henry Newman, responsible for the building of University Church, an artistic gem erected in the garden of 87 St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, has turned my attention again to the saint’s The Dream of Gerontius. In the 1865 seven-phase poem the elderly Gerontius – his name…
A Perfect Peace: Newman Saint for Our Time by Bishop Fintan Monahan (Veritas, €7.99) Newman: A short Biography by Michael Collins(Messenger Publications, €9.95) The canonisation of John Henry Newman last Sunday had brought his life and spirituality before a great many people who were perhaps only vaguely aware of their true complexity. Many of these…
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography by Carlos Eire (Princeton University Press, £21.00) The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila is a rightly famous book, and remains widely read. But the title is slightly misleading, for the text was composed not at the free volition of the saint herself, but at the insistence…
The Cockroach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, £7.99/€11.00) Felix M. Larkin Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, it often seems that events have overtaken satire – indeed, have made satire redundant. However, the distinguished author of such contemporary masterpieces as Atonement and Amsterdam, Ian McEwan has produced a novella which will stand as the definitive…
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…
Peter Costello
Greg Daly
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone