Admirabile Signum: The Meaning and Importance of the Nativity Scene Pope Francis (Veritas/Liberia Editrice Vaticana, €5.99) Here we are just back at school and college, and the first book about Christmas is already in the shops. What can this mean? Just as surprising is the name of the author of this little pamphlet. It is…
Last week I was reflecting on visionary political leadership, but I didn’t expect to be returning to the topic so soon. Queen Elizabeth II was one of those leaders, though perhaps ‘inspirational’ might be a better description. Her unexpected death last week was one of those impactful events that grabs a huge amount of media…
Saoirse Ronan can do anything – even a Dublin accent. Well she’s done everything else, right? Why not go back to her ‘real’ voice? It squeaked through in Brooklyn. Here we get the full “Dublin can be heaven/with a coffee at eleven” version. How strange that she chose the role of a trainee constable from…
Still Points: A Guide to living the Mindful Meditative Way by Bro. Richard OFM Cap (Hachette Books, €14.99/£12.99) Bro. Richard Hendrick is a Capuchin priest-friar working in Dublin. He wrote a long poem Lockdown which went viral. It was picked up by both the BBC and by CNN in North America. From there it went…
Leaves from the Cotton Tree, Celebrating Thirty Years of the Sierra Leone Ireland Partnership, with a foreword by Claire Buckley, Ambassador of Ireland to Sierra Leone, edited by Joseph Bockarie and seven others (SLIP, Kilt ale, Dunsany, Co. Meath, €15.00 + $5.00 p+p; email martindillon@slip.ie for payment details.) The cotton tree of the title stands…
Journey into Light: The Challenge and Enchantment of Catholic Christianity by Roderick Strange (Hodder & Stoughton, £10.99/€12.99 pb) A concern of some parents’ over the last decades is a feeling that somehow schools do not seem to impart religion, by which they mean Catholic culture, to their children in quite the way it was once…
With numerous sponsors, including Hinch Distillery Company, the triennial Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition brought 36 young hopefuls, of whom nine were Irish, to the National Concert Hall last week to participate in its preliminary piano-accompanied rounds before being whittled down to six for the finale with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Laurent Wagner.…
Several of this week’s stories and programmes had me thinking about the importance of visionary leadership and how that quality is largely lacking these days, especially in the political arena. The death last week of Mikhail Gorbachev, former premier of the Soviet Union, reminded us of a time when political leaders East and West were…
How to Succeed in Secondary School: A Practical Guide by Tony Bellew (Orpen Press, €15.00/£13.00pb) These first weeks of September, what with the anxieties of students of all ages about going back to school, the stress and strain on teachers, parents, and indeed families is very real. Their worries are not just economic, but also…
Under pressure of space this week, the series on places of faith, having encompassed lesser known aspects of Northern Europe, crosses the Atlantic, moving from the shrines of the Old World in Germany to the shrines of the New World in South and North America, from very ancient places honouring Jesus and the Three Kings,…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone