Reviews Articles
Is a radical church possible?
Adrian Alker, now retired from full-time Anglican ministry and chair of the Progressive Christianity Network in Britain, challenges the churches to radically reexamine their understanding of the Bible, and their theology in general, in his new book Is a Radical Church Possible?: Reshaping its Life for Jesus’ Sake. It could...
The most good you can do
The intent behind The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, by the controversial philosopher Peter Singer, is deeply constructive. It is arguing for a new ethical ideal: that people do the most good they can. The book is directed particularly at giving,...
Active hope
‘Since 1950, we have used up more resources and fuel than in all human history before this.’ I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this statement in the book Active Hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. However, we know...
Treasury of Blessings
Brian Bridge, a member of the Russian Orthodox church and an attender at Epping Meeting, has written a fascinating history of an Anglican group with strong Quaker connections and affinities: Treasury of Blessings: The Servants of Christ the King, 1943-2014 (SCK) was formed in England during the second world war,...
Disarming the argument
Tim Wallis says of his book, The Truth About Trident: Disarming the Nuclear Argument, that in one sense the book took three months to write, but in another sense it took thirty years. How so? It draws indirectly on his lifetime in peace work.
Blood and earth: modern slavery
Kevin Bales is co-founder of Free the Slaves, consultant to the UN Global Program against Trafficking of Human Beings and author of a widely praised book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Don’t talk about how the big people eat at the big table These words, spoken...
Petals and bullets
The book Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris - New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War by Mark Derby is a well-written and absorbing story. It is based mainly on eighty personal and evocative letters written by Dorothy Morris to her family in New Zealand between 1937 and 1946. In these years...
Treasure beneath the hearth
The Quaker approach to the Christian scriptures is a radical one, not well understood either among Friends, nor the wider Christian community. George Fox and Robert Barclay were always clear that they valued not so much the words of scripture, as the Spirit, the source from which those words sprang ...
What the mystics knew
Richard Rohr is a seventy-three-year-old American Franciscan. He has been writing about spirituality for a long time, and it’s beginning to show. He seems to have something like an ageing writer’s version of in vino veritas, which may be interpreted thus: ‘Damn it all! I’m going to...
Austerity
Mark Blyth has written a clever, well-argued book that we should all read. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea analyses the economic theory that wages and prices should be reduced, as part of budget cuts, in order to return an economy to a successful competitive state.