So, the referendum debates go on. The media coverage is increasing, though I’m not so sure it’s that enlightening. Today with Claire Byrne (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) gave plenty of time to it and was well balanced, though it became overly fractious. Minister Thomas Byrne struggled to define ‘durable relationships’. He said it would be…
One would have thought that every possible literary item from the present pope’s early years would have been brought to our notice. But this seems not to be the case, for here is a book, brought to us from those days in Argentina which will arouse great interest. How it came to be written…
Bob Dylan’s career ran chronologically alongside that of another iconic singer with the same Christian name. Bob Marley is less well known to most people than Dylan but Bob Marley: One Love (12A), a biographical drama of the Jamaican singer-songwriter, may change that. The casting of Kingsley Ben-Adir in the title role received the blessing…
Pastoral care for Loneliness: A New Apostolate, by Matthew Fforde (Gracewing, £9.99) Sometimes a reviewer has to ask themselves, following the changing events of the days, whether some books deserve to be noticed again, to prevent them getting lost in the flood tide of new books which seem so often to carry away good books,…
A Late Finding, a novel by Lucy Beckett (Gracewing, £20.00 / €24.00) We seem to live in a time where Catholic culture has passed out of general public discourse, especially in fiction. The days of Fr Benson, Belloc, Chesterton, Waugh, Graham Greene and others are lost in the past. Yet there must be a readership…
Many readers who find many of today’s novels present them with a problem, will find many titles that they long to reread (which is the real pleasure of all reading), or have heard of, but which never come their way, which are hard to find in libraries, will be delighted by what they can find…
Gaza, so much in the news recently, is one of the world’s oldest cities, though one might not believe this from what one reads or hears about it today in the media. Gaza, which lies 50 miles or so south-south-west of Jerusalem, was in antiquity a great Philistine city and fortress, often mentioned in the…
I recently mentioned 2024 as a year for remembering the centenary of a number of composers’ births or deaths. One such is Charles Villiers Stanford who was born in Dublin’s Herbert Street on September 30, 1852 and died in London on 29 March, 1924. Ideals of Brahms Stanford’s music is akin to the romantic ideals…
Some radio shows I listen to in the line of duty, some I actually enjoy, and it’s great when a show ticks both of these boxes. I really enjoy a relatively new feature on The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk Monday-Friday) – it’s the daily ‘Afternoon Update’ at 4pm when presenter Kieran Cuddihy chews the cud with…
Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age by Joseph Minich, foreword by Carl R. Trueman (Lexham Press, €25/ $29 / £21) How did we, in the West, move from a world in which belief in God was the default position to one in which it is an option among others? Charles Taylor’s The…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone