Last week I wrote about the March for Life in Washington. During the week other significant gatherings came across my radar. Most bizarre of all was the march on Washington portrayed in Messiah, an intriguing 10-part drama series on Netflix. This dramatic march was led by a character thought by his followers to be the…
Richard Jewell (15) You’ve got to hand it to Clint Eastwood – at 89 years old, he’s still churning out great films. I’d never heard of Richard Jewell before seeing this. In July 1996, the overweight security guard noticed a suspicious-looking knapsack under a bench at Atlanta’s Olympic Games. It turned out to contain a bomb.…
St Columbanus: Selected writings compiled by Alexander O’Hara, introduction by Fr Sean McDonagh (Veritas, €9.99 / £7.25) Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe edited by Alexander O’Hara (Oxford University Press, £68.00) Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus: Sanctity and Community in the Seventh Century by Alexander O’Hara (Oxford University Press,…
Utopia: The History of an Idea by Gregory Claeys (Thames & Hudson, £9.99) Looking at the cover of this brief but well-informed and penetrating history of the utopian ideal, I was engaged by the cover. This shows the flying city of Laputa from a Victorian edition of Gulliver’s Travels, a book much concerned with ideas…
My American Journey, by Douglas Hyde edited by L. Mac Mathúna, B. Ó Conchubhair, N. Comer, C. Ó Seireadáin & M. Nic An Bhaird (UCD Press, €50.00) Felix M. Larkin Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), long an almost forgotten figure in Irish history, is at last beginning to receive the scholarly attention that he undoubtedly…
You’ll struggle to find anything about it in the Irish media, but last Friday’s March for Life in Washington was impressive by any standards. March for Life (EWTN’s live coverage) was broadcast most of the afternoon and evening. Probably the most prominent part of the event was the address by President Trump – the first…
As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, 2020 commemorates the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in Bonn in December 1770. Son of Johann, a court musician, and his wife Maria Magdalena, Ludwig was their second child. An older brother, also named Ludwig, lived only a few days in April of the previous year.…
Moment in Time: A Legacy of Photographs. Works from the Bank of America Collection. Curated by Anne Hodge and Sarah McAuliffe National Gallery of Ireland, Rooms 6-10 | Beit Wing, until March 22, 2020 Moment in Time: A collection of Photographs (Museum of Photographic Arts, €45.00) Continuing the National Gallery’s new involvement in the arts…
Ciphers of Transcendence: Essays in Philosophy of Religion in Honour of Patrick Masterson Fran O’Rourke (Irish Academic Press, €35) This is a well-deserved Festschrift. Patrick Masterson was a loyal and valued staff member of University College Dublin for 30 years. Beginning in 1963 he was an assistant lecturer in the philosophy department and in…
From the Underground Church to Freedom by Tomáš Halík (Notre Dame Press, $US35.00 / £39.50) Frank Litton The 1950s were grim in Czechoslovakia. The promise of liberation had not delivered. The state acquiesced in a foreign-based orthodoxy which it imposed with brutality. Censorship stifled thought. It was into this Communist dominated world that…
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello