Restarting the blog

I've just discovered that the last post on this blog was made in the beginning of July. The months have flown by, mostly with prolonged illness and busy-ness in the parish. Desperate to find some leisure, I have spent longer away from the house, when possible. This has left little time for the computer or internet, and I have made any contributions directly to the parish website. But I thought I'd attempt to begin again here. And I'll start, as I attempted in July, with a renewed book-list. Let's just have the ten latest books, although I have thirty books open and active at the moment.

• Fr. Gerard Skinner, Dominic Barberi. I picked this up more than a month ago as Advent reading, and it is a marvellous little biography of the nineteenth-century Passionist Father, who had a notable devotion to the English Mission and spent much of his energy in efforts to return this country to the ancient Faith. His crowning achievement was bringing none other than Saint John Henry Newman into the Catholic communion.
• Fred Waitzkin, Searching for Bobby Fischer. A proud father's description of his bringing up his son, the American chess master, Josh Waitzkin.
• Margaret Barker, Temple theology. An interesting description of the theology and practice of the first Temple (that of Solomon) and the tabernacle of Moses that preceded it. The author believes that with the building of the second Temple, some seven hundred years before Christ, the theology of the first Temple was increasingly obscured, so that very little of it exists in the Bible, having being removed by Jewish scribes. This older theology was restored, she says, by John the Baptist and the Christian movement, which opposed itself to the second Temple priesthood.
• Deborah Cadbury, Dinosaur hunters. I found this in a charity shop and it's a compelling history of the beginning of the new sciences of geology and paleontology in the early nineteeth century. Reading this book in tandem with Father Skinners biography of Dominic Barberi (above) is extraordinarily jarring. These are two different worlds existing at the same time. Cadbury speaks of the physician and geologist Gideon Mantell's struggles to be expected by an elite scientific community and find recognition of his early paleontological discoveries, and of Sir Richard Owen, the comparative anatomist who put England on the map with physiology and anatomy.
• Tanja Poltl, Handlettering meets illustration. Haven't begun this one yet, but it appears to have some interesting watercolour mixing information. More to come.
• The Complete Jewish study Bible. This has been an ongoing read since the summer, after I finished the Catholic Bible in its Knox translation. This translation is not the very best, but it has interesting notes made from a Jewish perspective that I greatly appreciate. But the commentators are trying to hard to defend against anti-Semitism in this Bible, which I feel is misplaced. Any Christian picking up the CJB is unlikely to be anti-Semitic.
• Roy Schoeman, Salvation comes from the Jews. I've hardly begun this one, but the two chapters I've read are excellently written. The author is a Jewish convert to Catholicism and his devotion to the Blessed Virgin is the most beautiful part of the book. I should give this at least four stars out of five, right off the bat.
• Fr. Gregory Naik SJ, Jesuits of the Goa province. My father acquired this book for me, and I had hoped that it would focus on the initial missions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, these are quickly run through, and the book focuses on the later missions that were ordered after the Jesuit Order was re-established in the nineteenth century. Because of the opposition of the Portuguese government in Goa, however, this 'Goa province' was built outside Goa and remains today mostly outside the new Indian state of Goa.
• Shusaku Endo, Silence. A highly-rated novel about the Jesuit missions to Japan. The book has been loaned to me by a parishioner, and I hope to begin it in the Christmas holidays.
• José Barbosa Machado, Introduction to the Portuguese history, language and culture. This book is a loan from an old friend with a great appreciation for Portugal and Portuguese culture. My own Goan culture is derivative, so this should be an interesting read when I can find time to begin it.