Prompted by the Tuam babies controversy there were more and more harrowing personal stories, testifying to times that were less compassionate and often more cruel than today. Referring to the culture of the times helps our understanding but doesn’t provide justification – Church-run institutions should have been counter-cultural, should have set a much higher standard.…
The adorable Emma Watson proves there’s life after Harry Potter in Disney’s latest version of Beauty and the Beast. This time the beast (Dan Stevens) can only be freed from his wolf-like guise by the love of Watson, who’s distraught at being imprisoned in his enchanted castle until she begins to realise his heart is…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello