This year we were told that Halloween was less commercial than past years. This was not my impression, at least in our South Dublin neighbourhood. Having taken my afternoon walks around some of the nearby streets, I was surprised at how early and how generously some of the houses had been decorated. All the usual things…
Sir John Lavery is the sort of painter that people think they have a very clear and exact impression of, based largely on his early society portraits and the many important pieces he produced during Ireland’s revolutionary period, which ended with an image of his wife leaning on a harp gracing the new currency notes of the emergent Irish state.
Albert Folens was born at Bissegem, West Flanders, Belgium, on 15 October 1916. He was educated by the de La Salle Brothers. In 1928 he joined the order.
We live in a strange world in which it is possible for a young person to have an extraordinarily intimate relationship with someone of the other side of the world, and still know nothing of the old lady next door, and never speak to her. Screen to screen is the order of the day, person to person more difficult.
The Irish Freemasons Young Musician of the Year competition took place last month at the Society’s head quarters in Dublin’s Molesworth Street, but the competition actually began life in RTÉ’s Music Department where it had been the brainchild of the late Jane Carty and was known as Musician of the Future.
This title was pointed out before Christmas last year, as I recall, as a delightfully entertaining introduction to some of the great heroes and ordinary characters of the Bible, told in a story telling style with a particular appeal to modern young readers.
You know the old story of waiting ages for a bus and then a few come along together. I felt like that last week, with three new religious programmes on RTÉ.
Brides of Christ: Women and Monasticism in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland, edited by Martin Browne OSB, Tracy Collins, Bronagh McShane and Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB (Four Courts Press, €50.00/ £45.00) Patricia Rumsey As the number of candidates for religious life apparently dwindles, so the wider interest in religious life – and particularly women’s monastic life…
How to be good. What Socrates can teach us about the art of living well, by Massimo Pigliucci (Basic Books, £10.99 /€12.99) The Power of Ideas. Words of Faith and Wisdom, by Jonathan Sacks (Hodder and Stoughton, £20.00 /€20.00) Frank Litton Both these books inform our moral compass, helping to sharpen its direction and deepen…
Lydia: A Story, by Paula Gooder (Hodder and Stoughton, £9.99 /€11.99) Lydia is a person who appears briefly in the account of St Paul’s second missionary journey. She was a seller of purple cloth – in the 1st Century a luxury item – an apparently insignificant person in life. But in a longer perspective she…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan