In the days following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and with both houses of Congress in the hands of a Republican party keen to limit immigration and abolish President Obama’s healthcare system, there were no shortage of voices online calling for a withdrawal from civic life. “I’m just going…
Donal McCartney Michael Davitt: After the Land League 1882-1906 by Carla King (UCD Press, €50.00) Michael Davitt’s early career has been well documented, most comprehensively by T.W. Moody in Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-82. It was Moody’s contention that Davitt, in his role as ‘father of the Land League’, made his most significant contribution to…
A Church of the Poor: Pope Francis and the Transformation of Orthodoxy by Clemens Sedmak (Orbis Books / Alban Books, £23.99) This important book is written with the aim, it seems to this reviewer, of enlarging our sense of what ‘orthodoxy’ ought to mean in the era of Pope Francis. Prof. Sedmak is a distinguished…
Grace: The Remarkable Life of Grace Grattan Guinness by Michele Guinness (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99) Grace, born in 1874, was the daughter of Charles Russell Hurditch. He was a leading figure in the Protestant sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. However, she was best known as the second wife of Henry Grattan Guinness (1835–1910). Taney-born…
The Secret Scripture (12A) This curious film, based on Sebastian Barry’s Booker Prize nominated novel, will confirm watchers in the view that over-arching anti-clericalism seems increasingly prevalent in films today. Many of them seem to delight in shining a laser on Ireland’s dark past, especially in the treatment of vulnerable young women, especially vulnerable young…
American politics have become much more prominent in the media since the election of Donald Trump, and I reckon it’s important to sample a variety of media sources to get a balanced picture. Dipping alternatively into CNN and Fox News certainly gives the viewer different perspectives, but of late I’ve taken to following EWTN’s News…
In a Landscape Redrawn by Bishop Donal Murray (Veritas, €10.99/£9.35) Though it is not presented as a Lenten book, Donal Murray’s latest book is very much the sort of book which will provide readers with many insights in the way things are. He is writing very much for those who find the ‘redrawn landscape’ of…
Living – and dying – under a black flag The Raqqa Diaries: Escape from Islamic State by Samer, edited by Mike Thomson (Hutchinson, £9.99) In almost unbearably graphic prose, Samer – a pseudonym – describes a place in which atrocities are everyday, and life barely tolerable. Children walk to school past crucifixes from which decapitated…
Monody for a Much Loved Bookshop by Louis Hemmings, illustrated by Dora Kazmierak Carraig Books, a long-established bookshop in Blackrock village, is to close soon, certainly before the end of the year. It is one of the few second-hand bookshops that carry a large stock of philosophical and religious books, but as the owner explained…
World of Books The primacy of the word, what the Greek philosophers called logos, has been for many the only way in which both good and bad can be distinguished. Yet one has, in this day and this age, to doubt some whether this is always so. Take these words – they are from a…
Greg Daly
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan