When a drama is scheduled to run for four consecutive nights you know the broadcaster thinks it’s offering something special. And so it was with The State (Channel 4), which finished on Wednesday of last week. It was sad, disturbing, absorbing, and the recent terrorist attacks made this story of people joining ISIS all the…
The monasteries magdalen asylums and reformatory schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland 1853 – 1973 by Jacinta Prunty (Columba Press, €34,99) I found Jacinta Prunty’s account of the institutions of the congregation of Our Lady of Charity both magisterial and immensely satisfying. But here I must declare a personal interest. With other duties…
Radical & Free: Musings on the Religious Life by Brian O’Leary (Messenger Publications, €10.99) With vocations seemingly in permanent decline, there is a need, some Catholics might feel, for a book of this kind by an experienced lecturer, to explain to a sceptical age where the sources of a religious vocation lie. The answer to the…
Warner’s love of food in all its variety and versatility greatly enlivens his provocative, most entertaining book. He argues that healthy eating involves moderate consumption of a wide range of foods. The odd treat – a bag of crisps, a biscuit – does us no harm. The bag of chips that rounds off a jolly…
In the middle decades of the last century the National Geographic – then a magazine well worth reading – carried in the back pages a section of small ads for, among other things, elite schools. A feature of these were the ads for Military Academies. These were nothing to do with the US Army. They…
Online debate over converts in the Church, addressed in The Irish Catholic in the August 3 article ‘Late labourers can do vital work’, shows no sign of going away. Joseph Shaw, who blogs at lmschairman.org, posted on Twitter an interesting passage from Joseph Pearce’s book Literary Converts, detailing how the converts Arnold Lunn and Frank…
A bullet rings out in the night sky. It’s been discharged from a toy gun by a black man in a hotel room. Shortly afterwards the room is stormed by policemen. The people in the room are thrown against a wall. For the next hour they’re insulted, assaulted and threatened with death. Then murder occurs…
I was looking forward to the new drama Trust Me (BBC 1, Tuesday nights) – it looked promising from the trailers and starred Jodie Whittaker, impressive as the bereaved mother in Broadchurch, and soon to become the new Doctor Who (more on the gender issue later). Here she plays a nurse who turns whistle-blower but…
What Does It All Mean? A Guide to Being More Faithful, Hopeful and Loving By Richard Leonard SJ (Paulist Press/ Alban Books £17.99) If Catholicism is what Catholics believe, then sometimes these days it is not what the Church purports to teach. Take for instance the question of angels. These days many Catholics believe that…
Ian d’Alton The social history of modern Ireland Edited by Eugenio F. Balgini & Mary E. Daly (Cambridge University Press, £24.99) This substantial and weighty (literally – it’s 635 pages come in at a little under 3lbs) is self-described as a textbook. This does it both justice and injustice. The textbook element – the extraordinary…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Greg Daly
Aubrey Malone