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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…