Can I Stay in the Church? By Brian Lennon SJ (Columba Press, €12.99 / £10.83) This is a question which many people, aside from media personalities, must be asking themselves. The last couple of decades have certainly shaken many people’s faith and adherence. But being a Catholic is not entirely a matter of being in some…
The Dominican Way Edited by Lucette Verboven, with an introduction by Timothy Radcliffe (Continum, €14.55 / £10.99) From the prominence of his name on the cover, it might be thought by some potential readers that Fr Radcliffe had a larger hand in this book than he had. It is in fact the work Lucette Verboven,…
Kimmage Manor: 100 Years of Service By Patrick J. Ryan CSSP (Columba Press, €16.99 / £14.00) Fr Ryan has divided his life’s work between Africa and teaching in Kimmage Manor. He has also served, the times being what they are, as a parish priest. In this history he recounts the foundation of the mission house of…
The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature 1850-2000 By Richard Griffiths (Continuum, €33 / £25) Eamon Maher Richard Griffiths has probably been best-known up until now for his defining study The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870-1914 (Constable, 1966). His latest publication deals with English literature’s close relationship with Catholicism…
My Sporting Life By Jimmy Deenihan (Red Hen Publishing, €20 / £16.50) There is a unique link between politics and sport in Ireland. This is nowhere more apparent than in this autobiography by Jimmy Deenihan. Appropriately entitled ‘My Sporting Life’, it charts his successful transition from the playing fields to Leinster House and eventually ministerial office.…
A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness and Contemplation By Martin Laird (Oxford University Press, €15.85 / £11.99) Angela Macnamara The key to unlocking doorways of prayer is in our own silence. We live in times when ”our attention is riveted to surface noise” and silence is difficult to achieve. Even though some people live alone…
Haywire (15) ‘Oh you shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. That would be a mistake.” So says double agent Ewan McGregor to Michael Fassbender about Gina Carano in this amusing spy caper that has the beautiful Carano (a mysterious government operative hired out for unauthorised assignments) gallivanting around the globe on…
Fr Michael Collins Among the greatest of J.S. Bach’s choral works stands out the Christmas Oratorio, a collection of six individual cantatas. Each was composed for a particular day of the Christmas season, concluding with the Feast of the Epiphany. Bach used a libretto by Christian Friedrich Henrici, known by his nickname Picander,…
The Iron Lady (12A) If I could pick a fault with this stupendous film — a ‘biopic’ of Margaret Thatcher — it would be that it exists too much in a continuum. In other words, the scattiness evinced by the octogenarian Baroness (played stunningly by Meryl Streep) in the early scenes doesn’t change hugely…
Nature’s Way: A Sense of Beauty By Patrick O’Sullivan (Veritas, €7.99 / £6.80 pb) ”If spring came but once a century instead of once a year….what wonder and expectation there would be in all our hearts.” Longfellow’s words are the author’s inspiration as he awakens us to the beauties of nature which we usually take for…
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone