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…
Logan (15) They say there are really only a half dozen plotlines. Everything else in film (and literature?) is an exemplification of these templates. Old wine, new bottles. And so it is here. For all the blood-spattering, when we get down to it this is really just another tale of crime and punishment, of righting…
There were so many instances of classic media bias. It started with The Pat Kenny Tonight Show on TV 3, Wednesday of last week, when the topic was the Eighth Amendment, a debate prompted by last weekend’s meeting of the Citizens’ Assembly. First off there was a soft interview with a pro-choice woman who had…
Going Global for God: A Portrait of Ballyheigue’s Missionary Movement by Micheál Ó hAllmhuráin (Ballyheigue History and Heritage Group; phone: (066) 7133110 (during office hours only), email: ballyheigue@dioceseofkerry.ie) This is a splendid tribute to the men and women from the small parish in Ballyheigue in Co Kerry who spent their lives on the missions at…
The Catholics: The Church and its People in Britain and Ireland, from the Reformation to the Present Day by Roy Hattersley (Chatto and Windus, £25.00) Roy Hattersley prefaces his congenial history with a fascinating autobiographical fragment in which he recalls the ease with which his father could translate Latin inscriptions during their frequent visits to…
The advantages of social media as a tool for evangelisation or – arguably – an environment in which evangelisation can take place are discussed on a regular basis nowadays, but the difficulties of maintaining a coherent, timely and appropriate social media presence aren’t always acknowledged. This was demonstrated all too sharply last weekend, when the…
Felix M. Larkin Ireland’s Allies: America and the 1916 Rising edited by Miriam Nyhan Gray (UCD Press, €40.00) In August 1886, speaking at a gathering of Irish-Americans in Chicago, Michael Davitt said: “It is very easy to establish an Irish republic by patriotic speeches delivered three thousand miles away, but we could not do it…
Trespass Against Us (15A) Substitute cars for horses and this is a cowboy movie. There’s the same tribal loyalty, the same love of the outsider, the same revulsion towards authority. The heroes and villains of the wild west become the cops and robbers of regional Britain. We could also see it as the travellers’ answer…
Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? – a documentary with a name to draw in the curious, on Channel 4 last Thursday night. It was billed as an authored programme, an opinion piece, by Trevor Phillips, and despite advance warnings about bad language and racist terms, it was actually a reflective and relatively moderate programme. I…
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly