Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier (Bodley Head, £9.99) Peter Hegarty Author Lanier is a disenchanted idealist, a digital pioneer who once believed that technology would improve our lives. He now associates social media with “nastiness”. People come together in a setting “in which the main – or often the…
Smile of Joy: Mary of Nazareth by Thomas Casey SJ (Messenger Publications, €7.95) Fr Casey is currently Dean of Philosophy at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. But this book is a very personal and very human one. Using some of the familiar incidents in the Gospels that feature Mary of Nazareth he hopes he says to ‘reintroduce’…
Pat O’Kelly The National Concert Hall ended its 2017/18 International Concert Season recently with the first visit to Ireland of the Würth Philharmonic Orchestra. Initially I mistakenly thought Würth to be a place but closer scrutiny revealed it to be the name of an individual – the businessman, philanthropist and art collector, Reinhold Würth.…
The World of Books by the Books Editor Back in 2013, the Bishop of Northampton Dr Peter Doyle appointed Canon John Udris to inquire into the suitability of Gilbert Keith Chesterton for canonisation. Canon Udris’s report will be given to the bishop later this month. He has been quoted in the press as saying…
While the à la carte variety of Catholicism is thoroughly accepted and even lauded in mainstream media there are inherent inconsistencies. If, say, a vile racist people trafficker was claiming to be a Catholic in good standing, would the usual suspects be as tolerant as they are when the Church’s teachings on sexuality are dismissed?…
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven (Studies in Violence, Mimesis and Culture series / Michigan State University Press, US$29.95 pb) Frank Litton René Girard, who died in 2015, was one of the leading thinkers of our era – a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of…
Discovering the Boyne Valley by Noel French (Mercier Press., €14.99) Christopher Moriarty A small river, in quite a small country, yet a portion of the Boyne Valley contains an amazing wealth of solid remnants which incorporate a huge spectrum of human civilisation. A day trip can include them all and a good guidebook can outline the…
Kissing Candice (18) Midway through this psychedelic odyssey – the hell that is modern Ireland – I found myself thinking how much Ann Skelly, its main star, resembled Lady Lavery. And how, if Lady Lavery was the iconic image of a more halcyon time, Skelly could go on to become the face of the not so…
“It’s funny, I haven’t seen any outcry from ‘pro-life’ organisations about the treatment of children at the border,” observed author and columnist Jessica Valenti last week on her @jessicavalenti Twitter account. It was, she claimed, almost as though such organisations couldn’t care less about “actual babies”. Retweeted over 70,000 times, it’s worth reflecting on in…
With the increased popularity of podcasts, it’s worth noting the extensive archive of RTÉ Radio 1’s Documentary on One series. Last Saturday’s episode, ‘Sisters’, was Emma Decker’s engaging exploration of the lives of her grand aunts Sr Joe and Sr Gabrielle, who went to the US as teens to become nuns. They worked primarily with…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Greg Daly