I am REALLY looking forward to getting hold of John Drane's new book (coming out next week). After McDonaldization is the sequel to The McDonaldization of the Church. The new volume promises some thoughts on theology, ministry and mission in a postmodern culture. I am a long time fan of John's work. Put this one on your wish list right away.
I have just read an essay by James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, in which he speaks of his regret over opposing the consecration of Dr Jeffrey John.
"I had been one of the nine Diocesan Bishops to have objected publicly to the proposed consecration of Dr. Jeffrey John, now Dean of St. Albans. I deeply regret this episode in our common life..."
The theme of his essay is his deep wish to see debate opened up, not narrowed, and for the Anglican communion to walk together and not divide. He also writes about the ambiguity of relationships between David and Jonathan, and between Jesus and John in the scriptures. Well worth a read.
I have several letters on my desk at the moment, asking me to write books. I cannot write them all at once. I may be able to write one at a time, if I'm highly organised. I am the mother of a young boy, and I have a full time job. One book at a time, and if I work hard and things go OK, I may get another one finished this year.
But which of these tempting projects should I take up?
Rev'd Lamblove writes this perceptive and witty post about what NOT to write. Never, he advises, never read, and never write a "How to..." book. Especially not one on how to do Church. Go and read why...
I spent a great couple of hours this morning talking to Ian Morgan Cron and one of his fellow-ministers. Ian's first novel, Chasing Francis, came out in 2006 (my review here). It was great to chew the fat today about church, liturgy, life, music and future writing projects. If you haven't read Chasing Francis yet, go get your copy now.
Thank you to regular blog-readers and others who have read, reviewed, and been in touch about my recently published book. It was designed to be read through Advent and Christmas, to Epiphany. I'm delighted to discover that so many people found it helpfull; that's a great motivation as I crack on with the next piece of work.
Here are some of the online reviews of Beginnings and Endings:
Jody Stowell for Christian bookshops online
Big Bulky Anglican
Dave Paisley at Disaster Area
Bishop Alan
Andy Goodliff
Chris Erdman at Odyssey
Simon Marsh
Jonny Baker
Richard at Distinctly Welcoming
The book is still available direct from the publisher, from Church House or Amazon, among other places.
someone asked me yesterday when I grew a beard and moustache. EH? no, that's not me, it's Walter Brueggemann, although I appreciate the initial surprise... If you haven't read Richard's excellent blog and book yet, I recommend it.
someone sent me a link today (thanks Rhys) informing me that my book (cover price £7.99) is being sold second hand for £29.40 + shipping here: BookButler - Book Price Comparison.
No, I don't understand it either...
in the world of Amazon books and Tesco superstores, Real Live Preacher's approach to selling his books is a complete breath of fresh air.
I had a promo email today from YTC publishers, and I see that Jonny's new book about Labyrinths is out. I'll be interested to see this one, partly because Jonny is a friend whose work and innovative ideas I've always admired, but particularly because I worked with Jonny's team on getting the Cathedral Labyrinth to King's College Cambridge in 2002. The big-scale Labyrinth suited the space beautifully, and we only had to adapt it slightly to suit the College Chapel format. My guess is that other large public spaces would also "work"... but enough from me, check out Jonny's thoughts here: The Labyrinth: A Transforming Ritual - YTCPress.com.
A kids' movie called Stuart Little came out a few years back, and my son, then very small, absolutely loved it. It starts when a seven year old boy called George wakes up, rubs his eyes, puts on his Harry Potter glasses, and then leaps out of bed exclaiming "It's today, it's today, it's today!!!!"
Well I''m not seven, and I NEVER actually leap out of bed, not even at Christmas. But now my first cup of tea has woken me up, I do admit to feeling ... just ever so...
I blogged a while back about a new book by Chris Erdman, which is about preaching... no, wait. I can't say that on this blog. Because preaching is well out of fashion, right? Even the word presses all the wrong buttons. Not just bad preaching either - in our alternative-, pomo-, emerging-church world, even good preaching gets a heavy critique for being too good - too slick, too well prepared, so scholarly and well presented and complete and convincing that the preacher is once removed from everyone else, and you feel you can't argue back, can't contribute to the interpretation, can't somehow penetrate into ownership of the sermon.
The credibiity of the sermon is further damaged by a steady trickle of headlines about preachers who are found not to be practising what they preach, and the advisability of becoming a preacher is questionable given how many people buckle under the pressure of an idea of ministry that is beyond the scope of the ordinary human beings.
But that's not really what Chris is into either, when he writes about preaching. His title - "for those who dare to preach" - already flags up that he knows exactly the dangers of the preaching culture - it's toxic for the minister and disenabling for the listener. His book isn't at all how to preach better, work harder - it's about how to redeem the idea of talking about God within the community in a way that liberates the preacher as well as the listener. It's an antidote to slick preaching, bad preaching and inauthentic preaching, but still says - do we dare to preach? What would preaching look like if we didn't buy into the toxic stuff?
The real question I'm left with is, do we have anything to say? Just for a minute, let's not call it preaching. Let's describe what it really is - it's talking and telling the gospel in an engaging and inviting way that draws people in; offers them treasures without insisting on how they wear them; gives them ingredients and invites them round to help you cook.
Chris's book is really liberating, reimagining what the true task of gospel-telling is. It's not the dreadful treadmill of homiletics, and neither is it an exercise in covering up the vulnerabilities of the preacher. Chris re-focuses both the objective and the way of preparing so that you live the gospel, and let it live in you. In this way you become an authentic gospel-teller, not a slick salesperson; someone concerned with inviting not impressing.
It's good. Go read.
I have wept a few tears today for someone I never met. Ever since I was a child, I have returned to Madeleine L'Engle's books over and over again. 
A Wrinkle in Time was my first. I read Circle of Quiet for the third time this summer in France.
I learned from Ms L'Engle how to hold faith together with imagination, obedience and respect together with a healthy degree of rebellion, and that life is to be lived right now, not as a down-payment for the hereafter.
“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
Rest in Peace, Madeleine. Thank you, thank you for all you have given to your readers. Obits in the NY Times. and Episocopal Life
my new book, Beginnings and Endings, comes out next week. you can order it now on Amazon UK or Amazon.com. or direct from the publisher's online bookshop
My new book is just about to be published. Beginnings and Endings (and what happens in between) looks at the big themes of Advent. The book is laid out as short chapters, one for each day from 1 December to 6 January, to last from Advent to Epiphany. But you can just read it in one go if you'd rather.
Beginnings are important because Advent anticipates the coming of Christ into the world; because candles in the Advent wreath represent the signs of new beginnings through the salvation story - the journey of the Patriarchs, the promises of the Prophets, the announcement of John the Baptist and the conception of Christ. As well as writing about these themes, I also look at the way each of the four gospel writers begins their gospel. In literary terms, what does their starting point tell us about the way they are telling the story?
Advent is also about Endings, because it anticipates the second coming of Christ, and the end of the world as we know it. That's an idea shrouded in mystery, but it reminds us that every new beginning implies an end of something else.
Most of our lives, of course, are lived in between, with dozens of small scale beginnings and endings going on in and around our daily lives. Births and marriages, deaths and funerals, promotions, redundancies, retirements, graduations... all these milestones lead us through endings and beginnings. The characters in the story of salvation also lived through these, and we can trace through their stories some wisdom as we live through our own.
This book was a labour of love; lots of stories close to my own heart, lots of ideas I have carried around in my head that never had an outlet. It was fun to write (though Kathryn, David, Jason and Caroline, who read and critiqued the drafts for me will no doubt remind me of the moments when I said "why did I ever say yes to this???). I hope you'll enjoy reading it.
My son has read his Lion First Bible from cover to cover repeatedly until the covers fell off. Thank you, Penny Frank, if I have my author information correct. The last few months I've been hunting for something similar for an older child. Then I came across The Book of Books, by Trevor Dennis. Dennis re-tells the Bible narratives with beauty and wit, and gives an introduction to each section that gives a really good literary and historical context to the text, showing how the Bible isn't just any old book, but it is nonetheless a mix of myth and fable and poetry and history and law. My son is a very good reader, with a voracious appetite for Greek and Roman mythology as well as the Bible. For us, Dennis's book has a can't-put-it-down quality- we keep staying up too late because we want to read just one more chapter. I bought the paperback version; I'm not at all sure how many weeks the covers will survive on this one.
Chris Eerdman is someone I have met in cyberspace on a few occasions. I've now had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of his new book. It's about the process of writing a sermon, with the Chapters being headed by the seven days of the week leading up to Sunday.
Chris shows how getting inside a text in order to preach it well involves letting yourself be affected by it in every way. There is no space in his analysis for understanding and communicating something from a kind of professional distance. For Chris, the preacher is someone who is by definition being shaped by the texts she (or he) is preaching from.
There's a bit of a trend among those who are committed to new ways of doing and being church to regard the sermon as an outmoded form of communication. I've heard preaching dismissed as out-of-date, modernist, ineffective, top-down, a form of power abuse, a poor form of teaching,non-interactive... etc etc. Some of this is nonsense, some is valuable critique as to the quality of preaching, and some is a good reminder that there is more than one way of communicating. But I see no actual evidence that for one person to stand up and say what they think is out-of-date or ineffective. The ongoing success of the speakers' programme at Greenbelt is evidence enough for me that switched-on, post-modern Christians want to listen carefully to the prepared speeches of people they think might be interesting.
What we need, I would say, is not to relegate preaching to the recycling bin, but to improve dramatically on our ability to communicate. Preaching is one of a number of ways that, done well, can focus a community, raise morale, open up a subject for other forms of study, start a debate, proclaim a vision, articulate something important on behalf of a group... Surely we don't really believe that we can do anything without having people stand up and say something to the whole group? By all means let's try to do something about bad preaching; by all means let's explore a variety of modes of communication and learning. But no preaching, not ever? I seriously don't think so. And you only have to look around any expression of Church to see that most people don't think so either - even if they say they do. Why, you can go and hear the notable proponents of Emerging church, fresh expresssions, etc., preaching regulary up and down the land ...
Good preaching, then. Yes, bring it on. Check out a sample of Chris's book here. then go and buy it here (UK) or here (USA).
I've had the awesome task over the last couple of weeks of proof reading my book against the manuscript - a strange process, as many parts left me thinking, "Hmmm, I could have written that a bit differently...". But at this final stage edits have to be limited to what's really necessary for accuracy. Happy to say, though, that some pages I felt totally pleased with - they really say what I wanted to say, and I don't have any urge to re-write them in my head, or think how I could have said it better.
Yesterday I proofed the cover blurb.
and today... it's gone to press! Yay. It will be out just in time for Greenbelt, so I hope they invite me to speak this year :) There are discounted pre-orders on Amazon...
Right, now for the overdue essay for BRF, next week's prayers for the Church Times, and Sunday's sermon which needs another story and a good polish. Write write write...
EDIT: I'm entertained by this photo someone has sent - 
actually, my desk doesn't look like this, but the frazzled feeling it evokes feels a bit familiar...
It's been pointed out to me several times that the name of a new book on one particular theory of atonement has the same name as one of my songs. I gather the book is a response to some of the arguments that have been going on lately since the Chalke-gate thing happened a couple of years back. I haven't read this latest book yet; I am almost finished with A.K.M. Adam's rather wonderful Faithful Interpretation (good enough that I am actually reading all of it, carefully, not just giving it a speed-read review) and on the other side of the desk I am also reading Alan Jacobs' absolutely splendid tome, A theology of reading. I hope to blog-review these in more detail ere long, but already I would urge anyone interested in how we go about the interpretation of the Bible to get both of them.
But back to He was pierced... here are some random lunchtime thoughts on atonement theory and disagreements about doctrine.
Any thorough-going atonement theory (i.e. a theory of how the death of christ "works" to put right a broken relationship between God and humanity) is going to include some close attention to sacrifice and judgement - God's forgiveness is certainly full and free, but it isn't cheap and fluffy, and neither is it blind to the serious ills of the world. All the same, no thorough-going theology should (even unintentionally) present God as mean, judgemental and narrow-minded. I rather suspect that is really what Steve Chalke was trying to get at in his book, even though he left himself open to misunderstanding.
John MacIntyre reckons there are at least 27 different theories. I find something of value in all of them, and I don't think that any of them, in isolation, nor even all of them put toegether, are sufficient to give a full understanding of the consequences of the death of Jesus Christ. There's a lot to be said for holding different theories together - they aren't mutually exclusive, but can balance each other out and offer a richer understanding held together than by choosing one as pre-eminent over all the rest. A thoroughgoing theory of atonement needs to be multi-faceted. It needs to include an understanding of the rightful anger of God against violence, hatred, injustice, the abuse of power - in fact against all that mitigates against love. That's what sin means. An atonement theory also needs to include the idea that the cross is an inspiration and example to us to lay down our lives for our friends. (I'm quoting John quoting Jesus there, I didn't make that up). And further, it also needs a more universal view, something that reflects the idea that atonement is not limited to the sins of an individual, but that the world and everything in it is released not only from human sin, but from the grip of evil and the tendency for things to degenetrate into violence and destruction. An associated idea that should always be noted, I think, is the warning that anyone (Jesus being the first among equals in this regard) who devotes their life to justice and peace and love is likely to end up paying dearly for it. Finally, any discussion of the atonement needs to aknowledge an element of mystery - because however much sense-making our theology does of the atonement, there's always an added sense that we don't totally know "how it works", although that needn't stop us knowing it does work.
I find it really sad that something as fascinating, as poignant, as ijmportant and life-changing as the atonement is becoming a peg on which to hang arguments between different factions of the Church. I can't decide whether this spoof of the Old Rugged Cross - Old Argued Cross - is funny or sad. How particularly ironic that it was just as Easter unfolded this year that the latest argument erupted over theories of the atonement. Surely we are not supposed to be fighting about whose theory of the atonement is "the right one". Isn't the point precisely that we are not right; that we don't understand; that all our musings about God are incomplete? That only God can see everything; only God can make things right? Of course it seems unbelievable that God could be quite as generous as some dare to believe; there is this human instinct that comes variously from fear, meanness, or a form of tribal exclusivism, that wants to insist that only if we sign the "right" doctrinal statement or buy into the "right" interpretation, will God's grace work and people be allowed to belong to the Christian Club. I am so tired of liberals slagging off Evangelicals for being narrow; of evangelicals dismissing liberals for being woolly. It's so pointless. I hear the words of the Epistles of John echoing in my head - written, it would appear, by an elderly man who sums up the wisdom of his years by saying, "Children, you know the only thing that really matters in the end? - that you love one another. "
The longer I live, the more I believe that the beauty of the atonement is not that it only works if you believe it in the right way, it's that it works even if you don't understand it at all. I'm not going soft on doctrine - I love doctrine with a passion, and I spend a good slice of my life teaching it - but even I have to admit that we aren't saved by doctrine, and that God can be visibly and awesomely at work in the lives of people whose doctrine is well wide of the mark. The grace and generosity of God is, I'll grant you, completely outrageous. He seems to insist on including people in the Kingdom of God who are not like me at all. Where does it come from, this need to have doctrinal proof of someone else's salvation? I have to wonder whether that isn't precisely the kind of thing that Jesus died to save us from.
I'm going blog-lite for the next couple of weeks. The proofs for my forthcoming book are demanding all my spare time...
Prodigal Paul reviews my latest essay here: Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog: Whose Text is it Anyway? Limit and Freedom in Interpretation - Reviewed - An essay by Maggi Dawn..
The book is being launched at Synod today. 
My chapter is on hermeneutics (how to read and interpret the Bible). Nice words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the Foreword, and other chapters by Arnold Browne, Andrew Mein, Jeremy Morris, Duncan Dormor, Jessica Martin, John Hare, Malcolm Brown, Michael Beasley.
Blogger Dave Paisley at Disaster Area says, "This is the kind of work that should have been done by the Episcopal Church long before Gene Robinson..."
more words about the book here
Published now. Chapter One is mine, on hermeneutics.
Nice words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the Foreword. There are chapters on biblical interpretation by Arnold Browne and Andrew Mein. Sociological, historical and medical views from Jeremy Morris, Duncan Dormor, Jessica Martin, John Hare, Malcolm Brown, Michael Beasley. All the authors are based in Cambridge.
‘Here is an oasis in the desert of the Anglican debate . . .This book is rightly aimed at those who are unresolved on questions about homosexuality. Its contention that these questions are important but should not be church-dividing will ring true with many.’ Professor David Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge
‘… an extremely useful and sympathetic guide for the ordinary lay or clerical reader who wants to learn more about the issue which seems to be pulling the Anglican Communion apart …’ David Jones, former Deputy Director of Oxfam and a member of General Synod
"“An Acceptable Sacrifice?” The answer is simple: No. It is not acceptable for us to discriminate against our brothers and sisters on the basis of sexual orientation just as it was not acceptable for discrimination to exist on the basis of skin colour under Apartheid." Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
David Ford writes nice things about the book I've just contributed to:
“Here is an oasis in the desert of the Anglican debate about homosexuality. Through a rich, accessible theological inquiry the authors lead us deep into vital questions to do with the heart of the gospel, scripture, response to change, the relevance of history, the unity of the Church, and faithful discipleship today. Given the unavoidability of divisive issues, it may be that one of the best gifts the Church of England could give to fellow Anglicans, fellow Christians and many others is what is offered here: a Christian wisdom of dispute in controversy..." Professor David Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity,University of Cambridge
I have a chapter in An Acceptable Sacrifice (Eds Dormor and Morris), which is now coming out mid-January (earlier than the planned date). It's a collection of essays from different disciplines, but all responding to the vexed question of the church's traditional doctrine and homosexual relationships. The book opens with my chapter on hermeneutics, and two chapters by an Old Testament and a New Testament scholar, between us looking at how to read the Bible and how to treat the passages that seem specifically to address the issue. There are also sections on the Church and the history of marriage, the Church and sociology, and a very interesting chapter on human sexuality written by a consultant obstetrician.
Get the book at the reduced price of £8.99 from Ekklesia and you will also be contributing to charitable causes: Buy AN ACCEPTABLE SACRIFICE PB from Ekklesia and raise money for christian peace and justice work.
or for the RRP of £10.99 from Amazon UK
ISBN-10: 0281058512 ISBN-13: 978-0281058518
I promised myself that I would blog more of the books I read - so easy just to put them down and read the next one. Over the summer I've read a pile of books, some for work, some for review, and some just for me! One that I read purely for my own interest was Leaving Church: a memoir of faith - I think I saw it pre-viewed on Prodigal Kiwis blog and ordered it right away. 
This is the book I quoted from in my Greenbelt talk back in August.
Leaving Church is an account of Barbara Brown Taylor's own journey into faith, ministry, and then Ordination; then her experience of life as a parish priest, first in a big city and later in a small rural town. Eventually, the story begins to track how and why she leaves the life of a Parish priest, and what are the good and bad things about that experience. I trust (given the title) that that is not too much of a spoiler.
One of the reasons I love this book is because it traces the ambivalence that any Priest worth her (or his) salt is bound to live with - loving God, loving the Church and yet being painfully aware that commitment to Church brings as many constraints as it does freedoms, as many handicaps as priveleges. Taylor puts her finger on the tension between living out what you believe you were called for, and living within the expectations that others have of a priest (almost invariably not the same thing!) To be a priest with any authenticity you have to be fully human, and yet very often it is the Church community that works against that necessity. Sometimes people will not accept ministry if you are not a priest, and yet they won't accept your humanity if you are. Taylor also relates beautifully and tenderly the tension of living with a sense of calling, and the way in which that can so easily spill over into sheer workaholism and the inability to say "no".
The title, "leaving" might just as easily be read as "finding" - it's not a negative account at all, more an account of how, in order to continue a journey of faith and simply of human life, the season of ordained ministry had to be put to one side. One of the reasons I like the book so much is that - unlike so much other rhetoric among Church leavers that is very simplistically anti-priest and anti-institution - she offers considered insight into the tensions of faith communities and their leaders, and shows how sometimes those communities disallow our calling first to be human, and only then to be ministers. She doesn't claim to have left the Church because she didn't believe in it any more, nor because she didin't believe in what she had done thus far, and she doesn't hold the Church in any kind of contempt. Rather, she relates the complex reasons why a clear shift in role and direction became desirable for her, and what she learned along the way. There are plenty of people who will give a bitter account of why they left, trashing where they have been before. It's refreshing to read someone who gives an affectionate and grateful account, despite finding in necessary to leave all the same.
I think anyone interested in Church would benefit from reading this - priests and leaders and ministers of course, but perhaps also those who take different roles within Christian communities - if we could think together about our mutual ministries and what our various roles give to the community, perhaps it would be possible to break down in some places the undesirable divide between the "professional" and the "rest" and start living as communities of truly interdependent people? Either that or I imagine that I and many others will eventually follow the path that Barbara Brown Taylor has found essential.
Chasing Francis is Ian Morgan Cron's first book. Its theme is the way that Church can break down when her institutional structure squeezes the life out of her. But it's an unusual book in that it tries to fuse several forms together - it's a mix of novel, historical biography and theology. In many ways it works very well indeed - the main character, Chase Falson, is the Pastor a "the largest Evangelical church in New England" who has a breakdown under the pressure of a ministry that's coming adrift from his personal convictions. His Church's way of dealing with the problem is to give him enforced leave of absence, after which he must either come back with his faith restored, or move over and let someone else take over. Falson goes to Italy and stays with some Franciscan monks, one of whom is his Uncle Kenny. He finds his faith is restored - but in a story that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the fortunes of conversations such as "Emerging", Postevangelical, and the like, Falson finds his faith not only restored but entirely reshaped. What happens when he comes back to his Church, fired with vision for the gospel but speaking a different language, is the end of the tale.
Morgan Cron is a good writer - this is his first book, and the characters are believeable, the storyline moves along, and there are plenty of wonderfully humorous and touchingly poignant moments. It does creak a little in places - in the same way that Gaarder's Sophie's World did - under the strain of trying to be a story that makes a point. There are pages where the story has to stand still while a sermon is preached or a lesson delivered. I wonder if there isn't something inherent in the form of fiction that demands that you can't absolutely make a point and still have fiction that lives and breathes. But that's a literary discussion for another day, and like Gaarder's book, despite these fault lines, Cron's book is well worth a read. If you like McLaren's fiction, or are interested in the idea of Emerging church or New Monasticism, I warmly recommend this one to you.
Bart Ehrman, author of 'Misquoting Jesus,' is an agnostic who was formerly a "born again" evangelical believer. The story of how he lost his faith is recorded in the Washington Post. I have a great deal of sympathy with his story. I was once a "born again" believer, and it was in part the recognition of endless intellectual dishonesty, both in biblical interpretation and in church practice, that led me to re-conceive my own faith. For me, though, the end result (so far at any rate) has not been the loss of faith, but a radical reconstruction of it. If, like Ehrman, my faith had depended on the inerrancy of the "original texts" of the Bible, I guess I would have lost my faith too. But the truth is that our faith is not solely based in the Bible, and its inaccuracies and inconsistencies have in any case been known about and lived with for a very long time indeed. Coleridge wrote engagingly in 1824 that reading the Bible as if it were a book, and not a divinely imparted magic text, could only enhance its capacity to connect real human beings with God.
When I lost my naive faith, I had the good fortune of coming to land in a place where the Bible is taken in the context of reason and "tradition" (by which I mean the history and practice of the Church, not "traditionalism"), and consequently the inaccuracies, mistakes, inconsistencies and unknowns of the Biblical record do not necessitate an abandonment of faith.
It intrigues me why people continue working, in a negative way, against a faith they have lost. Where does the energy come from? And what kind of a mission is it to spend your life disproving something? Once you've disproved something, surely there are more interesting projects to move on to?
All the same, I sympathise with people like Ehrman who do lose their faith, because I've walked close to that line myself, and see close-up the crisis that ensues when someone who has carved out their life around a profession that goes hand in hand with a belief system that subsequently crumbles. I'm reminded of the middle-aged Priest in David Hare's Racing Demon, who was faced similarly with the crisis of what to do, as a career priest, when the core of faith seems to vanish.
The article about Ehrman borrows John Updike's description of a loss of faith:
Where does it go, this belief in things not seen? Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."
I wonder whehter things might have turned out differently for Ehrman had he, like his wife and friend, emerged from a tradition that balanced the Bible with other core elements of faith?
Found this book on a friend's bookshelf the other night and started to read - it's an extraordinary story about a man who is completely paralysed in an accident, and wakes up to find that although his mental capacity is unimpaired, he can only move his eyelids. With this minimal physical ability he works out a system of communication simply by fluttering the eyelids (hence the "papillon" of the title, and with the help of a friend he writes this entire book. Despite the tragic element in his circumstances, it's not a sad book but a grand testament to the human spirit.
(Le Scaphandre, BTW, is a diving suit or a space suit. I had to look that up, and a few other words besides. I gather you can get this in English translation if you don't read French - it's by Jean-Dominique Bauby.)
[Hardy's] story is founded on a recognition of the ironic truth which we all know in our hearts, and are all forbiden to say aloud, that the richest kind of womanly nature, the most direct, sincere and passionate, is the most liable to be caught in that sort of pitfall which social convention stamps as an irretrievable disgrace. It is the unsuspicious and pure-minded girl in whom lie the noblest possibilities of womanhood, who is the easiest victim and has to fight the hardest fight......the book's essence lies in the perception that a woman's moral worth is measured not by any one deed, but by the whole aim and tendency of her life and nature. The writers who have had eyes to see and courage to declare the same truth about women are few indeed; and Mr Hardy in this novel has shown himself to be one of that brave, clearsighted minority.The Illustrated London News, 9 January 1892
I'm inundated lately with books to review - some of them so dense and turgid in style that I wondered whether to send them straight back. So I was glad to receive one that was both interesting and an easy read. The kind of book you can take on a plane or read on the gym bicycle - engaging, but no need to take notes or use the dictionary. 
By Patton Dodd, My Faith so Far is an account of the author's conversion to charismatic mega-church christianity, and his subsequent journey through major misgivings about his own faith to a more normal experience of living with the mix of faith and doubt that must accompany a realistic appreciation of the contingencies of human existence.
I was initially put off by the prologue, which, like the Epilogue, is less well written than the main part of the book. Skip the prologue and go straight for Chapter one, where you gradually get drawn into a well-told story. For me the interest really picked up about half way through at the point when Dodd described going to Oral Roberts University - a first hand account of what it's like to be in an intense "Christianised" culture, and an educational institution based in the assumptions of one narrow view of Christianity, something that British people would (perhaps mercifully) have little opportunity to experience.
I imagine this book would be of primary interest to readers who have at some time experienced the sickening thud of reality breaking in to the strange world of Fundamentalism, and the inevitable crisis of faith that follows. My Faith So Far doesn't tell you the answer or offer you a route out of fundamentalism. Instead it gently comes to terms with the uncomfortable but liberating truth that there isn't "an answer" - and that this in itself is the way out of the glittering but empty spirituality so commonly experienced in the MegaChurch.
The book would also be interesting to anyone who wants to get an insider view on USA MegaChurch Christianity and ORU.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Recent Comments