Brendan O’ReganIn our search for meaning in life, we sometimes reach for the sky. In a very significant and metaphorical way, that seems to be the drive behind ‘God’s architect’ Antoni Gaudí’s massive basilica, the Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona. Last week Pope Leo XIV inaugurated a new tower in this building – the Tower of Jesus…
Category: Reviews
Big budget blockbusters coming your way this summer
Aubrey MaloneIntimate dramas are generally more quality-studded than ‘big’ movies. The latter are flattered by the opportunities provided by multiplexes, as opposed to that nightly visitor to our living rooms we call the television set. This summer the following behemoths await you should you decide to submit yourself to their not so tender mercies. Disclosure…
Out of our minds: the threat posed by AI
Peter Costello
The first encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIV opens with a focused expression of what the pontiff has to say: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” He…
A shining star of Irish life
Here is a book which will interest and delight those many viewers who have followed the career of one of the country’s leading broadcasters. Miriam O’Callaghan was born on January 6 at Cornelscourt, Co. Dublin. Her father was a civil servant, her mother was a teacher. Miriam attended St Brigid’s, the local national school in which…
A biographer at large
Biographers are usually so busy investigating other people’s lives, as to pay little attention to their own. However, in this revealing book Anne Chambers recounts some of her experiences as a biographer, providing interesting sidelights on Irish writing and publishing. As an account of a long career by a non-fiction writer, it is a rare…
A reflective story from the front lines
It should be no surprise that I’m interested in stories about journalists, and I’m particularly drawn to stories about war correspondents on the front line. The Road to Hope with Fergal Keane (BBC News, Thursday) was a reflective and retrospective documentary narrated by the Irish journalist who worked for the BBC for years. It was…
A walk on the Wilde side at the Gate Theatre
Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband has been filmed a number of times. This week, however, I’d like to depart from my usual genre and recommend a theatrical production of it that I recently enjoyed at the Gate Theatre. Films are fine, but there’s nothing to compensate for the experience of having real people within…
The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona The triumphant achievement of a great artist
The completion and inauguration of a cathedral is a rare event in modern Europe. Yesterday the Pope was in Barcelona to inaugurate the cathedral of the Holy Family on the centenary of the death of its architect Antoni Gaudi. These two books provide two contrasting biographies for readers. Peter Stanford, a well known British Catholic…
How a European observer sees our shades of faith
There are many contested happenings in Irish history – invasion, the conflicts over land, religious hegemony, secularism, the liberal ethic. One that still raises passions and evokes strong opinions is the nature and place of conversionism, or proselytism, in the Irish story. It hits at the heart of who today’s Irish think they are. It…
A Kerry poet and the tides of life
Mary Kennelly’s first collection, Sunny Spells, Scattered Showers was published in 2004. Since then subsequent books have appeared from a number of Irish publishers. On the Wind and the Singing Tide is her first collection from Salmon Poetry, “one of the most consequential houses in the Irish literary world in the last half century” according…