My Book Reviews

In my last post I reviewed Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr, O.F.M., which is a fairly recent book on meditation/contemplation from a Christian perspective.  If one is not a member of the Roman Catholic tradition, one will not realise that there has always been a distinction drawn between meditation and contemplation. This distinction is one of order or level as it were. Let me explain here: I spent some three years of my life as an Augustinian brother and when we meditated at 6.30 A.M. we read some piece of Scripture or a short piece from some spiritual book and then set it aside and meditated on whatever sprung from the page, as it were, into the mind for some twenty minutes. After that we said the morning prayer of the Church together as a community for approximately twenty minutes and then went to breakfast at roughly 7.15 A.M. So meditation had a distinct focus on a text or a theme: in other words, it was pretty methodical.  Lexio Divina  is a traditional p...

Twenty-first-century human beings live stressful lives.  I work in a small secondary school just on the outskirts of the inner city of Dublin.  My experience as a part-time counsellor and full-time Resource Teacher in an ASD unit attached to that school is that the young adolescents whom I teach (who are all boys) experience more stress in their young lives than I did at their age.  The various problems that they present with are: (i) mental health problems - mostly reactive depression, some clinical or endogenous depression - either unipolar or bipolar - and sometimes schizophrenia, (ii) personal problems occasioned by family breakdown, (iii) relationship problems, (iv) identity problems, (v) addiction problems, and rarest of all among the general school population, namely exam pressure, but such academic pressure features to the forefront of problems experienced by the ASD cohort. Parents, needless to say, are also experiencing much stress if their sons and daughters ...