Timothy Keller 
Saint Ignatius of Loyola: A Convert’s Story
by Patrick Corkery (Messenger Booklets, €4.95/£4.50)
From this month through July 2022 the Society of Jesus celebrates an Ignation year. This marks the 500th anniversary of St Ignatius’ ‘conversion’.
He had been struck down on the field of battle and was confined to his bed, recovering from a cannonball wound to his leg. During the period of confinement he slowly changed his reading from romances to spiritual books. So began a slow alteration of his own interior life, that he eventually wanted to share with others.
During this year there will be many events and publications, of which this is one of the first into the field. These small booklets (like the old Catholic Truth Society pamphlets on which three generations were reared) play an important role. Not everyone wishes to read larger biographies, or complicated theological treatments. So this booklet by Patrick Corkery, now studying for the Jesuit priesthood, will be ideal for many. In a way he is sharing his own present approach to the man and his teachings.
He remarks that after Loyola’s death he was remembered as a small man with a constant smile. How lacking that smile is in the religious around us. The smile reflected his love of God, of course, but also for plain humanity. This is a good place for readers to begin their own search of the meaning of St Ignatius in the world today.
The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy
by Timothy Keller (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99)
Of all the books of the Old Testament, the Book of Jonah, reading as it does like a moral fable (which indeed it is) is all too easily misunderstood. In this little book Pastor Timothy Keller suggests that all too many persist with the tale until the prophet is released from the belly of the whale, and then abandon it. However, he suggests that it is what happened next that is most important. In it he says “one of the most powerful and important lessons of the Bible is hidden”.
He thinks too that the misadventures of Jonah take us too into places we would rather not go and relations with people we would rather not meet or care for. These he sees as some of the “deepest counsels of God”. But this is God’s message through Jonah: “how Christians in a time of great division [especially in America where the author lives] even when it takes them to uncomfortable places”.
The notes in the old Challenger edition, I noted years ago, underlined three points here. Jonah was the only prophet aside from Christ to arise in Galilee. He prefigures in his own person the death and resurrection of Christ. But uniquely – and very relevantly for the world today – Jonah “was the only one of the prophets that was sent to preach to the Gentiles”. Now that is a sobering thought, worthy of reflections.
