Back to the Well
The ‘ressourcement’ movement helped create the intellectual climate for the Second Vatican Council through its critique of a theology which had as its dominant concern not so much seeking an understanding of faith and mystery, as responding to and opposing heresies.
Homo Ludens
Sport may change over time, and individual sports come and go, but the essential remains, for this mundane activity also offers us a brief snatch at transendence, the moment arising out of chaos when all your teammates occupy ideal positions, when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours.
The People’s Music
The British folk music scene began to thrive through its extensive club circuit in the 1950s and gave a platform to many Irish singers. It was seldom without tension, however, between purists like Ewan MacColl and others who put greater stress on enjoyment.
Bohemian Rhapsodist
Walter Starkie was an enthusiast for Gypsy music and culture, a professor of Romance languages, a director of the Abbey Theatre, an accomplished violinist, a literary translator and a harbourer of the hope that Ireland might experience a spiritual awakening which would incorporate a great deal of fascist political doctrine, ‘properly understood’.
The Death of a Language
When does a language begin to die? When children raised to speak it struggle to acquire a native-speaker level, and therefore the “language community” fails to regenerate itself linguistically, Joe Mac Donnacha argues. According to that definition, the evidence suggests that the condition of the Irish language has indeed become terminal.
Words At Will
To get into the best English society, Oscar Wilde thought, one must either feed people or shock people. And so, while they fed him, he shocked them with his wit and insolence. And yet he managed for the most part to insult the English without offending them.
That Kind of Beauty
It is difficult to define the picturesque, and yet it is a term commonly associated with the Irish landscape. What makes one site or location a more worthy attraction than another may seem arbitrary, but there is a religious and cultural architecture to what we might consider accidental beauty.
Back in the GDR
Elizabeth Shaw, born in Belfast in 1920 to a bank manager father from Sligo, became a celebrated children’s author and book illustrator in postwar East Germany and a member of the state’s cultural elite. A primary school is named after her in Berlin.
The Light from the East
A new book demonstrates the longlasting and deep engagment of various Irish scholars and practitioners with the religious and cultural traditions of eastern Asia.
No Partition, No Planning, No Poverty
Some old familiars are to be encountered in a historical geography of Donegal, but it is more surprising what is not encountered.