As the Anne Murray song says, “We sure could do with a little good news today.” Well, I have some this week. It was great to see news coverage of three of the Gaza hostages being released last Sunday, great to see them smiling and reunited with their families. This was facilitated by the new…
Tim O’Sullivan Pour L’Église: Ce que le monde lui doit (“On Behalf of the Church: What the World Owes to Her”), by Christophe Dickès. (Perrin, €16.00); can be purchased directly on-line from Chapitre.com.) In a letter last November, Pope Francis called for a renewal of the study of Church history. In this stimulating book,…
The recently completed restoration of Notre Dame in central Paris has absorbed the interest of so many people over the last five years that other such work in other places have been sadly overlooked. Central Paris gets millions of visitors each year; Palermo, the capital of the Island of Sicily, is less popular, for various…
We Live in Time (15) is a flashback-filled love story starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh. Pugh has cancer but is upbeat about it – and indeed about everything. The film narrowly avoids being a tearjerker as she navigates her way through her medical problems. There are some cringy scenes, most of them engineered by…
Every now and then someone gets peeved at something that happens in church and resorts to the nearest secular confessional. They often tell what they perceive as the sins of others! On Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) someone complained that eulogies weren’t allowed in the Diocese of Meath, and that the rules required that any…
September 5 began like any other day in Munich 1972. The Olympic Games were taking place there. Everyone was excited. Mark Spitz had just won his seventh gold medal in eight days. Then terror struck. Or to be more precise, terrorism. Eleven Jewish athletes were taken hostage by five members of a commando wing of…
Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat (Birlinn, £14.99 / €18.00) Edinburgh: The autobiography, edited by Alan Taylor (Birlinn, £20.00 / €24.00) I am always astonished when Dubliners extol the graces of Georgian Dublin, thinking to myself that they can never have seen Edinburgh to make such a statement. Undoubtedly the New Town of Edinburgh…
Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lenten Book, by Eric Varden (Bloomsbury Continuum, £12.99 / €15.50) Here we are, as I write on the sixth day of a New Year. Christmas is well past; but life and faith go on. This title is the first book addressed to Lent and Easter tide that has come to hand;…
Dreaming a New Dream: Conversations on the future of the Church in Ireland, by Jim Deeds, with a foreword by Julieann Moran (Messenger Publications, €9.95 / £8.95) The pastoral minister Jim Deeds will be familiar to many readers as the co-author with Brendan McManus of Discovering God in the Mess and its two follow-up titles. This is…
So, the Jubilee Year has started, with its Pilgrims of Hope theme, and my hope is that the media will give it reasonable coverage. Chatechesis (Radio Maria, Thursday) got off to a good new year start, linking in with the Jubilee Year. Deacon Don Deveney, with guests Martin Ramsay and Artie Nolan, both on the…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone