Monasticism: A Very Short Introdction Make My House a House of Prayer: Reflections on the Family Rosary
by Gabriel Harty OP (Veritas, €3.99)
This little book is by a veteran Dominican priest now in his 90s. Known as ‘the Irish Rosary Priest’, he has passed his vocation establishing prayer groups all over Ireland. The key element of his new publication is one which will make it relevant to the up-coming events later in the year.
He has written a commentary on each decade of the Rosary with reflections on the family. These can be read as part of a devotion, or on their own. Over the centuries many Irish people have found themselves vitalised by the Rosary.
As devotion it is not perhaps as common as it was. Fr Harty hopes, clearly, in the course of this exciting year to change all that.
Monasticism: A Very Short Introdction
by Stephen J. Davis (Oxford University Press, £7.99)
This is another in a very excellent series, which provides many readers with a first step or two in exploring important themes in life, philosophy, and religion.
Stephen Davis is Professor of Religious Studies, specialising in the history of ancient and medieval Christianity. At the turn of the present century he lived in Egypt for four years, where he was a professor at an Arabic-language theological seminary in Cairo.
Now director of the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project, in 2013 he initiated a project to catalogue the collection of Coptic and Arabic manuscripts at the famous Monastery of the Syrians in Wadi al-Natrun, Egypt.
In a very short space he manages to cover not only the origins of the monastic idea in Egypt, but to trace out its history since then referring on the way to other cultures too. Nor does he neglect the renewal of the idea in more recent times.
Though many Catholics think of monasticism in relation to the centuries of the European high Middle Ages, for Irish readers this book, which explores the actual origins of the monastic idea in Egypt, is very relevant to Early Christian Ireland as well.
Interrupting Silence: God’s Command to Speak Out
by Walter Brueggemann (Hodder & Stoughton, £10.99hb / £8.99pb)
Silence, according to the old saying, is golden: this applies to the contemplative silence of the monastery, the silence of awe in the presence, or apprehension of the numinous.
But here the well known Biblical scholar and minister in the United Church of Christ, a denomination rooted in the Puritan and German Evangelical traditions of the United States, writes of a different kind of silence, and what he has to say will be of interest to all Chrstians.
The silence with which he is concerned is the silence of those who have been cowed, abused, or outcast. He urges people to consider their own times of silence. Were they wise to be silent? Or should they, in the presence of evil, anger, and wrong-doing, have spoken out firmly on the side of goodness, compassion, and virtue?