Fireside Miscellany: A collection of Irish Memories, Meanderings and History by Denis O’Higgins (available from Eason Monaghan and other outlets, €10.00) This is a collection of delightful short stories, such as we would expect to find in an issue of Ireland’s Own. They reveal that the author was born and raised on a small farm in…
Science of Life Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that began in China during the Tang dynasty (618 – 907). It is a combination of the insights of Buddha (490-410 BC) with the Tao. The Tao is an intuitive philosophy used in China for thousands of years and pointing to the essence of…
State Papers: Echoes of the past from the archives The value of these annual releases is not always to understand the immediate past, as so many journalists seem to think, but to cast light on obscure matters over the last two centuries. People abroad often write directly to the government seeking information, often about…
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has ordered a review into the plight of persecuted Christians around the world and how much help they get from the United Kingdom. The review, to be led by the Anglican Bishop of Truro Philip Mounstephen, will look at government efforts to help some of the 215 million Christians who…
Bright Wings, Dappled Things: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ with photographs of Fr Francis Browne SJ, commentary by Jo O’Donovan RSM (Messenger Publications, €17.95) Desmond Egan This brightly produced book is aimed not at specialists but at ‘beginning readers’ and within such a modest aim, it is excellent. It offers a fine selection of Hopkins’s…
Pro-life activist Michael O’Dowd is to run for election to the European Parliament. The Renua Ireland member has announced that he plans to run in the North-West Midlands constituency vowing that the theme of his campaign will be ‘Family, Community & Country’. Mr O’Dowd said that “today, if you have a traditional view, you are…
State Papers: Secrets of the powers that be These days the poet Patrick Kavanagh is seen by some as something close to a saint, certainly a man of sensitive expression and deep spirituality. But this was not the opinion in 1938 of Dublin booksellers or the gardaí in College Green barracks, as a police…
Defending and protecting human life means rejecting abortion, caring for the sick, offering a decent welcome to immigrants, valuing the contributions of the elderly, encouraging families to have children and caring for the environment, the bishops of Italy have said. “We are called to welcome life before and after its birth, in every condition and…
The Sunday Papers. A History of Ireland’s Weekly Press edited by Joe Breen and Mark O’Brien (Four Courts Press, €55.00) Joe Carroll This is a welcome scrutiny of Irish Sunday newspapers. It covers the whole of the last century and the first decade of this and, as the editors point out, shows how these weekly newspapers…
This year I will restrict myself to focusing only on books that deal explicitly with spirituality, notwithstanding some very fine novels and books on social commentary that I read this year. But first, an apologia: taste is idiosyncratic. Keep that in mind as you read these recommendations. These are books that I liked, that spoke…
William Reville
Fr Ronald Rolheiser