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 ...

A Note on Mythology and Demythologising Here in Ireland, we are commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of what we commonly call the Easter Rising , or simply the Rising , or even more simply still 1916 .  All three terms are etched into the consciousness of every Irish man and woman since birth almost - at least into that of my own generation anyway (I was born in 1958 and recall well its fiftieth anniversary).  Looking back at that anniversary through the twin lenses of my own age and that of the repeated documentaries from those more innocent days of 1966, one can say without a shadow of a doubt that the 1966 commemoration by our young state was shot through with almost pure mythology.  After all, we were only a young nation some 44 years free of the British yoke, freedom having come in the watershed year of 1922. As a young nation we needed a strong mythology to bring us safely and surely through years of economic struggle with a determination to forge an nat...

Review of All Hell Let Loose: The World At War 1939 - 1945 by Max Hastings Harper Press, 2011 My well-worn copy of this book I have long been fascinated with why human beings of one nation make war on another. Another lifelong preoccupation has been what motivates some of our kind to dominate and subjugate others. As individuals we are complex creatures, and as groups or nations we are equally complicated, if not more so.  The intertwining evils of hate and its concomitant violent consequences have cast ominous shadows over human cultures since the dawn of civilisation.  Max Hastings' 750 page tome is an amazingly comprehensive account of the Second World War that is based chiefly on thousands of individual accounts from all nations involved in that dreadful cataclysm that befell humankind between the years 1939 and 1945. In short, what we get in Hastings' brilliant and comprehensive tome is a "worm's eye" of the greatest tragedy that befell humankin...

Some Literature Dealing with Moral Evil and the Suffering Resulting Therefrom A Moral History of the Twentieth Century . Jonathan Glover London: Pimlico, 2001. For my fuller review of this book see  HERE Sunday Times Culture   S upplement of November 4, 2007 One Soldier's War in Chechnya, Arkady Babchenko, November, 2007 Jesus says many wise things which have become timeless truisms.  One is "the poor you will always have with you."  One could almost hear him averring the truth of another such saying as   "wars you will always have with you."   One need not be a historian or even a tolerably good politician to realise the truth of this latter contention.  A casual glance at the news in any medium will convince you of the endurance of war, of its seeming endlessness.  I shall start this post (quasi-review) with a few quotations from real-life witnesses of the horror of war.  Once again, one of my quotes comes from Jona...