Friend of the Poor. Mary Aikenhead: Woman of Vision, Commitment and Inspiration by Rosaleen Crossan (Columba Press, €12.99) Pope Francis declared Mary Aikenhead to be Venerable on March 18, 2015. This is the first step towards canonisation. It was a much deserved accolade. Mary was born in Cork on January 19, 1787. Her father, David…
Last Sunday Netflix launched a new documentary, Hostage to the Devil, about the legendary exorcist and former Jesuit Malachi Martin. My appetite had been whetted by an interview with one of the producers, Sharon Lysaght, on The Ryan Tubridy Show, Wednesday morning of last week. As documentaries go it was excellent, a fascinating story well…
Michael McDowell SC The Ireland of Edward Cahill SJ 1864-1941: A Secular or a Christian State? by Dr Thomas J Morrissey SJ (Messenger Publications, €19.99) Dr Thomas Morrissey, himself a Jesuit priest, has chosen for his latest work of historical biography one of the foremost Jesuit proponents of the Catholic Action Movement in Ireland between…
The Nugents of Westmeath & Queen Elizabeth’s Irish Primer by Denis Casey (Four Courts Press, €9.95) The Nugent family trace their beginning to Gilbert de Nugent of Normandy, the 1st Baron of Delvin, who arrived in Ireland in the 12th Century. By the middle of the 16th Century they were well and truly Anglo-Irish. At…
Mindful Meditations for Every Day by Sr Stan (Columba Press, €12.99) In Ireland, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy has long been much admired. One of the surprises among the releases of State papers at the turn of the year, as least to this reviewer, was a file dealing with the proposal put to the government that it…
World of Books These days we have little expectation of astonishing works of literature or scholarship from a bishop. They are all too busy with mere administration to have the mental energy to expend on scholarship or literature. It was not always thus. Look for instance at the writings of 19th-Century Irish bishops, such as…
Live By Night (15A) The ‘myth kitty’ – if I may borrow Philip Larkin’s famous phrase – of this atmospheric crime flick ranges from The Godfather and Goodfellas through Scarface, The Road to Perdition and Chris Cooper’s Black Mass. A more immediate reference point might be Ben Affleck’s The Town, which mirrors it in its…
I spent way too much time last Saturday glued to my screens watching the proceedings of the Citizens’ Assembly, streaming on the RTÉ News Now channel and online. It was a lot to take in. First off, I found it rather disconcerting to find an unrepresentative bunch of citizens (100 to represent four million?) meeting…
Dirty Secrets: What To Do About Tax Havens by Richard Murphy (Verso, £12.99) Tax avoidance is one of the greatest difficulties besetting the world economy. Accountant and tax campaigner Richard Murphy estimates that 10% – maybe more – of the world’s wealth is hidden away in tax havens. Taxed, the secreted trillions would provide more…
Among the most consistently interesting religious blogs over recent years have been those on the Catholic channel of patheos.com, with Eve Tushnet’s being a fine example of this. Tushnet, who converted to Catholicism in 1998, describes herself as an “openly lesbian and celibate Catholic”, and writes often on themes of religion of sexuality. In a…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone
Greg Daly