Michael Duggan, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael Duggan

Shocking Protestants: Warren Lewis and Quintin Hogg as accidental ecumenists

June 26, 2021

What happened when convinced anti-Catholics of the established order had an actual personal encounter with the Church, its people and institutions?

All Ireland that Froze for Want of Europe

May 02, 2021

A long read by Michael Duggan on the Irish novelist, Francis MacManus, who "could write about the Catholic faith in a way that was tender but committed, welcoming 'the winds and rains of grace which blow from eternity through the gates of the sacraments upon the human creatures of this narrow world'."

Starlight on a clay floor

December 07, 2020

Seamus Heaney drifted from the Church, but his poetry offers a link to the past

What happened to St Louis IX’s hundreds of converts from Islam?

November 27, 2020

A new study is full of imaginative sympathy

Prophets who foretold the end of Catholic Ireland – and mourned it

November 15, 2020

Long before its collapse became evident, three writers foretold the decline of the Irish Church – and worried about what would come next

God and mammon: How religious longings were captured by commerce

September 25, 2020

The Enchantments of Mammon By Eugene McCarraher Elknap Harvard, £31.95 Eugene McCarraher detests capitalism. Yet, to his immense credit, and to the great benefit of his book, he keeps polemic and manifesto-making largely at bay until the epilogue of a 700-page exploration subtitled “How capitalism became the religion of modernity”. Then, while twice approvingly quoting

I never understood the lure of Eton College. But on one pilgrimage, I found more than I bargained for

September 21, 2020

On a Saturday morning in July, I stood for a few moments on the edge of the main road that runs from Slough to Maidenhead, somewhere between the site of the Taplow Giant Car Boot Sale and the Nike Factory Shop. And then, turning heel, I began walking south, away from the hum of traffic,

Tolkien learned early that the road through life is a rough one

August 21, 2020

The Worlds of JRR Tolkien By John Garth Frances Lincoln, 200pp £25/$29.95 Early in his new study of the places that inspired Middle-earth, John Garth draws our attention to the painting Tolkien made for the cover of The Hobbit, with its glacial colouring and snow-capped mountains dominated by one forbidding peak. Garth then directs us

Leeds’s legendary manager: A passionate Catholic they call ‘El Loco’

August 21, 2020

Some readers may remember a couple of Herald pieces in recent years highlighting the grip Catholic football managers seemed to have assumed over the Premier League, with one winning team after another being coached by a man reared in the faith and often devoutly practising it as well. This run has just been interrupted with

On both left and right, free thought is becoming impossible

June 25, 2020

Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes By James Mumford Bloomsbury Continuum, 224pp, £16.99 Beware of “package deal ethics”. They are ruining our capacity to think and converse about the world we live in and the world we are heading towards. This is the message at the heart of James Mumford’s Vexed. The packaging up of ideas

What the Notre-Dame fire did to France

May 29, 2020

Notre-Dame: The Soul of France By Agnès Poirier Oneworld, 240pp, £16.99/$26.95 I lived in northern France for two years in the early 1990s. Among those I knocked around with, in the newspapers I read, and in the films I watched, I don’t recall noticing much evidence that the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris was so

A good pub is hard to find – but not impossible

May 29, 2020

Catholics know all too well the banishment from the higher things in life – indeed the highest – incurred by the coronavirus lockdown. But like others we endure the more worldly deprivations of these strange times as well. Much ink has already been spilt on the loss of one forbidden zone in particular: the pub.

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