Reviews Articles
Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation, by Richard Bauckham
Richard Bauckham, a former professor of New Testament Studies, invites us to rediscover our membership of the Community of Creation. This community is larger than the community of humankind. It consists of many species, some extinct, others recently born.
Choosing Life: My father’s journey in film from Hollywood to Hiroshima, by Leslie A Sussan
I should say up front: Leslie Sussan and I are both members of Bethesda Meeting in Maryland, USA. She has been working on this book about her father, Herb Sussan, for thirty years.
Conspiracy, directed by Frank Pierson
I recently plucked up courage to watch this film, which I have had on my shelves since I bought it in a charity shop a couple of years ago. It is a hard watch but essential viewing, increasingly so with the resurgence of fascism in the world.
The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us, by Nick Hayes
Nick Hayes’ fascinating and provocative book is a tearing away of much of the pretence of British history. A nation’s view of itself is rarely realistic and in our case the fabrications are literally set in stone. The great houses and estates of the land are, if we care...
Practical Mystics: Quaker faith in action by Jennifer Kavanagh
‘Oh, Jonathan – the Quakers? Lovely people, but completely impractical!’ This was the polite (but stinging) verdict, sometime in the early 1990s, on my latest head-in-the-clouds, ‘Manchester Guardian’ venture – attending Quaker Meeting in Wandsworth. It was delivered by Mrs O, the elderly mother of an old school friend, who had introduced...
Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, by Philippe Lançon
This riveting book, which I discovered by accident in a secondhand bookshop, transcended the rest of my lockdown book pile. Philippe Lançon is the journalist who ‘played dead’ when terrorists burst into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. This account is a story of...
Passion and Partings: The dying sayings of early Quakers, by Jane Mace
This is an extraordinary little book that defies classification. Piety Promoted was a collection of volumes from the seventeenth century, full of ‘the dying sayings of many of the people called Quakers’. Jane Mace has with great care put together a sample of these words to enable us to look...
Credo? Religion and Psychoanalysis, by Patrick Casement
What is the relationship between our emotions and our spiritual life? In this short book, an eminent psychoanalyst describes the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in his life.
The Good State: On the Principles of Democracy by A C Grayling
Quaker decision making does not work in the same way as democracy, exactly. Friends get the ‘sense of the meeting’ and, if we do not agree, we wait until we do. Politics isn’t like that. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the least bad way of conducting politics...
Talking About Skin: A memoir, by Rosa L Carter
Rosa Carter, who is a Staffordshire Quaker, has written a fascinating memoir. Although originally only intended for her three sons, it has now been published for a wider audience. It should be essential reading for white Quakers who wonder about the lack of black people within the Religious Society of...