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Military academies have served youth for more than a century with proud traditions of producing graduates who are scholars, leaders, and athletes who adhere to a code of honor and ethical principles as they take the knowledge, skills, and dispositions gained at those academies into higher education, the business world, military service, civic endeavors, and the broader workforce. There is a current gap and need for research that explores the various components of a K-20 military school/college education and how those components successfully produce leaders of character for our military, civic, academic, and business worlds both in the United States and abroad. The Handbook of Research on Character and Leadership Development in Military Schools synthesizes research on the impact of military academies by providing a singular compendium of current academic studies on the graduates of military academies and the communities of which they enter after graduation. The chapters will explore the academics, leadership, character development, citizenship, athletics, and other dimensions of both global and national, and both private and public, military academies. This book is ideal for current leaders, staffs, governing board members, and alumni of military academies both in the United States and internationally along with policymakers, government officials, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the implications of character and leadership development on individuals enrolled in or graduated from military schools.

Mark Patrick Hederman, former headmaster of Glenstal Abbey School, and now Abbot of Glenstal Abbey, looks at the flaws in the Irish education system and how it should be doing more to develop the imagination of our children to help them meet the challenges that lie ahead. Drawing on examples from literature and popular culture, Hederman proposes a child-centred model of education, containing self-directed and independent learning, which encourages the student to play an active role. By turns cutting and humorous, The Boy in the Bubble is an astute portrait of a system which has been criticised by many as being outdated and destructive, and offers in its place a fresh and progressive vision for the future of education in Ireland.

Michael D. Higgins is one of Ireland's leading public intellectuals. As well as having made a significant contribution to public life, he is a prolific poet, whose work ranges from the personal to the political, and geographically from the west of Ireland to Nicaragua and the Middle East. Here, he has gathered together the very best of his poetic output over the years. In these poems, he casts a wry, compassionate eye on human weakness and resilience, and the centrality of love to all human relations. Throughout it all, his yearning for a world marked above all by social justice stands out. This collection is a treasury of the very best of his writing over the years and is sure to delight younger readers as well as his established followers.

‘My proposal is that, at this time, the Holy Spirit is unearthing an underground cathedral in Ireland which could help to replace the pretentious, over-elaborate Irish Catholic architecture of the twentieth century. An underground cathedral is a metaphor which describes an alternative place and time of worship.At this time, the secret work of the Holy Spirit is not being done, in most countries of Western Europe, by politicians nor by church institutions. The people who are carrying the torch are mostly artists because, as Rainer Maria Rilke foretold, in destitute times we have to rely on art to show us the way forward. Now, it does not matter very much that such work goes unrecognised, that people fail to acknowledge their sources, that the Holy Spirit remains incognito. That has been the profile of the Holy Spirit since the beginning of time.'Coupled with very incisive and honest comments on the current state of the church in Ireland, and with a reflective meditation on the Murphy Report on the Dublin Archdiocese, Abbot Hederman offers a visionary and very stimulating image of how things might be if only we all listen to the voices of artists in our midst.