Reviews
This Reviews section of Anglicanism.org features a wide range of reviews including publications old and new, plays, Church courses, broadcasts and other items and events. Suggested Reviews may be submitted via our Contacts page.
Review: The Holiness of Ordinary People – by Madeleine Delbrêl
Kathryn Rose writes: Madeleine Delbrêl's *The Holiness of Ordinary People* offers a profound exploration of spirituality in everyday life, providing readers with an insightful reflection on how ordinary people can live out their faith in the world. Delbrêl, a French Catholic social worker, writer, and mystic, draws from her own life experiences working in the streets of Ivry, a working-class suburb of Paris, to share her observations on the holiness found in the mundane. ...
Review: What Christ? Whose Christ? Alan Race & Jonathan Clatworthy (Editors)
Jason Plessas writes: For a book that sets the Nicene Creed among other things in its sights, What Christ? Whose Christ? reads in some ways like a credal rededication to the founding principles of Modern Church, the liberal Christian theological society to which its editors Alan Race and Jonathan Clatworthy belong. The pair’s introduction relays the book’s antecedence in a 1921 conference at Girton College, Cambridge, entitled ‘Christ and the Creeds’, held by a group of Anglican modernists called the Churchman’s Union which across the ‘20s “debated, and largely doubted…the physical resurrection of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, miracles and the realist and ransom doctrines of the Atonement”. Race and Clatworthy enthusiastically adopt the CU’s mantle, as the book “continues this spirit of critical enquiry first highlighted at the turn of the twentieth century and yet often still resisted at the turn of the twenty-first.” Where is this Churchman’s Union then, you might ask, if its work of the last century goes uncompleted in this one? It became ecumenical and now operates under a different name. You guessed it: it’s Modern Church, of course! In its promises of bearing the flame of theological free enquiry, What Christ? Whose Christ? does not disappoint. ...
Queer Redemption: Dr Charlie Bell
The Rev'd Dr. Keven Hall reviews Queer Redemption by Dr Charlie Bell: Dr Hall writes in his review of this book that Bell believes gay people don’t feel listened to in the church, not just to do with their sexuality, but about their personhoods. Not properly listened to by the majority in the Church of England, not properly listened to by its leadership. Bell sees his task as attempting to reach Christians and Christianity with how they can do better at meeting queer people 3-dimensionally. And, broadly speaking, to see how more of us can learn to live better with our complex, often difficult, psychologies and differences He seeks to return the church to the irreducible core of the life of Christ by resurrecting the best of Anglican theological method, with his use of experiences of gay people as his point of reference. ...
Vile Bodies – The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith and Practice
Dr. Gill Atkinson writes in her review of Adrian Thatcher's book: “Vile Bodies” is an extraordinarily well researched and in-depth study. As the title suggests the book is an account of the human body as a disgusting thing in Christian teaching, faith and practice; the term “vile” used by St Paul to describe his own body. An historical, theological and sociological approach is taken to the examination of cultural norms, taboos and practices which have resulted from, and fed into, Church scripture and teachings. In the introduction the author tells us that, the all-powerful idea in the Christian tradition that the body is vile has had a huge negative influence on millions of people past and present and that the purpose of the book is to explore why this happened, continues to happen and what can be done about it. ...
REVIEW: Anthony Swindell, Going to Extremes in Biblical Rewritings: Radical Literary Retellings of Biblical Tropes
Jonathan Clatworthy writes in his review: This book illustrates the literary reception of the Bible. The ‘extremes’ are the freedom which many writers bring to rewriting biblical stories. Some rewritings are antagonistic to the biblical text, the ‘hypotext’. Some use it as a departure point for a quite different development. Some amplify the hypotext, some condense it. There are prequels and sequels. Some change the tone, making it tragic or comic. Some give greater emphasis to minor biblical characters, or introduce new characters. Sometimes the viewpoint of the narration changes. For example The Dream of the Rood moves the viewpoint of the Crucifixion from that of an onlooker to that of the cross. ...
REVIEW: The Precarious Church – Redeeming the Body of Christ by Martyn Percy
Sebastian Satkurunath writes: I wanted to like this book; I really did. The stated premise, that church is at its best when it is outward focused and trusting in God to provide rather than prioritising its own security in the form of financial resources and numerical growth, is a compelling and appealing one, and thoroughly in the spirit of the sermon of the mount (Mt 6.25-34). What’s more, there are clearly many ways in which the Church of England fails to meet this ideal, ...
REVIEW: God Interrogated – Reinterpreting the Divine by Lynne Renoir
In this Review Rosalind Lund writes: Lynne Renoir grew up in a deeply conservative Christian home and spent the first fifty years of her life deeply committed to the Christian Faith. However, despite believing that Christianity is true, she did not experience any sort of transformation, ...
Review – ENGLISH VICTORIAN CHURCHES: Architecture, Faith, & Revival by James Stevens Curl
Conservation Architect John Woodcook reviews: ENGLISH VICTORIAN CHURCHES: Architecture, faith & revival by James Stevens Curl. - Never has this book been so needed! Over 20 years after the publication of Simon Jenkins' England’s Thousand Best Churches, this volume again brings to the attention of a wider readership the richness of ecclesiastical architecture. The intervening years have not been kind to our church heritage or indeed the role of the Church as an institution in society generally. ...A
Book review. My Journey as a Religious Pluralist: A Christian Theology of Religions Reclaimed – Alan Race
The Rev'd Dr. Peniel Rajkumar writes: Few theologians have approached the many questions and challenges that religious plurality poses for Christian theologies of religions with such honesty and depth as Alan Race. Never the one to dodge difficult questions, Race has both problematised as well as probed, with passion and profundity, a wide-range of themes and questions that are concomitant to Christian understanding and engagement with other religions
World Congress of Faiths – Spirituality and Ecology: Religious Wisdom for the Future – Review of online Conference 29th April 2021
Jenny Kartupelis reports: Spirituality and Ecology: Religious Wisdom for the Future - The UK-based World Congress of Faiths, in collaboration with the Parliament of the World’s Religions, held an on-line conference on 29 April to explore the interplay between spirituality and ecology.