After a period of ill-health, I'm going to try to post more regularly here. It won't be as regular as it was this time last year, and I'll be duplicating some of the posts over at the parish website. This is a more personal blog, but it remains closely linked to the parish and the parish website.
I've just edited the little book-list on the side-bar here. One of my great flaws is acquiring more books than I can read, and then beginning to read some of them. That means I now have something like twenty-five books open, some of them have been open for years. Here are the new entries, books I either found in the second-hand shop at Mount S. Bernard Abbey, or heard about and had delivered to the house.
- Through the lands of the Bible, by H. V. Morton: this is the fourth of this popular English journalist's travelogues that I have acquired from second-hand shops. He writes marvellously and provides a Christian tour of Syria, Babylonia, Egypt and the Holy Land, and various locations throughout Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, which were the haunts and the stops along the way for the early Christian missionary priests. I've so far read of his trip from Alexandretta in northern Syria to Babylon, at the drainage zone of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.
- The complete Jewish study Bible, edited and arranged by B. Rubin: a Messianic-Jewish reading of Holy Scripture with notes and commentary. One of thing that Christians today miss in their study of Scripture is the Jewish atmosphere in which these documents were composed, an atmosphere that was just as present to the 'God-fearing' Gentiles of the first century as it was to the Jews themselves. It is therefore useful to find a Jewish commentary of this type. Sadly, the book does not treat the so-called 'deutero-canonical' books from our Catholic Bibles: Baruch, Tobit, Judith, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Maccabees I and II and Wisdom of Solomon. I would love a Jewish commentary of Ecclesiasticus, which is the bridge between the Jewish observances of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament.
- Jesuits of the Goa province, Fr. G. Naik: an overview of Jesuit history in Goa, where my family comes from. My father gifted me with this book and it will be interesting to discover more about the Order's moves into and out of the Portuguese territories over the years. Fr. Naik was archivist for the province, and provides information from never-before-seen documents in their archives.
- A concise guide to cats, E. Williams: being extremely tempted to acquire a cat for S. Joseph's wildlife sanctuary, I picked this small book up from one of the shops in the city. It introduces the various pure-breeds and provides some cat-ownership guidelines.
