Reviews Articles
Small but perfectly formed
Celebrating the Quaker Way by Ben Pink Dandelion. Quaker Books. ISBN 978 1 90712302 3 £2.50. Quakers like their theology pocket sized. I’m sure that’s why Advices & queries is so special. There’s something very Quakerly about a mobile text. In this tiny book Ben starts immediately to praise the riches of...
The Water Table
The Water Table by Philip Gross. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 1 85224 852 1. £8.95. Philip Gross has had a distinguished career as a writer and teacher while managing to avoid becoming a household name. He has written fiction, children’s opera, radio plays, horror and science fiction as well as poetry. The Water Table,...
‘I believe God will save every person’
If The Church Were Christian by Philip Gulley, HarperOne, ISBN 978 006 169 8767. £14.98. Indiana Quaker pastor and author Philip Gulley has been shaking the foundations of midwestern US Quakerism for almost ten years. This book could produce another much needed shaking there. In the 1990s Philip Gulley published a popular series of...
Sacred heart
Anyone who has experienced semana santa (holy week) in Spain will appreciate the extraordinarily dramatic way in which the story of the Passion of Christ is depicted in colourful processions through the streets. Dating back to the sixteenth century, they are at there most Catholically extravagant in Andalusia – especially...
A Messiah for Quakers
Social by Social
Social by Social by Andy Gibson, Nigel Courtney, Amy Sample Ward, David Wilcox and Clive Holtham. Published online at www.socialbysocial.com. ISBN 978 1 906496 41 8. Free download, or print copy at £9.99 incl. UK postage. Lots of people are nervous of computers and the big web of connections that’s out there....
Letters to my granchildren
Baking Cakes in Kigali
Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin. Atlantic Books (Grove Atlantic Ltd). ISBN 978 1 84354 7471. Paperback: £7.99 ‘Like the Ladies Detective Agency but in Rwanda’, screams the cover of this edition. And the back. The fear with this book is that it only made the shelves because the publishers have decided we...
Holding it together
We are all made of glue by Marina Lewycka. Fig Tree (Penguin Group). ISBN 978 1 905 49022 6. Hardback: £18.99 Georgie Sinclair, the heroine of this delightful novel, edits the trade magazine Adhesives in the Modern World. About as exciting as a history of tractors in Ukrainian, you might think, and yet the fascinating...
Three thousand years from Galilee to the world
A History of Christianity: the first three thousand years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allan Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. ISBN: 978 0 713 99869 6. £35 The size alone is impressive. Comprising 1,161 pages including almost sixty pages of index, seventy-seven pages of notes and fourteen pages of suggested further reading, it makes you realise that...