Making Sense of Faith in God
Jonathan Clatworthy
SPCK Publishing, June 2012. Paperback, 96 pages.
Details / buy from: Modern Church
Publisher's notes: This book deals with the popular interest in spirituality, and physicists' interest in God, as opposed by the new atheists. It also considers the role of God in a secular society. Modern secularism separates religion from secular knowledge and expects us to explain reality without reference to God. This taboo on God limits our understanding of life as we experience it, and undermines confidence in human knowledge generally.
Reviews by Laura Sykes, Jeyan Anketell and Gillian Straine.
Making Sense of Sex
Adrian Thatcher
SPCK Publishing, June 2012. Paperback, 96 pages.
Details / buy from: Modern Church
Publisher's notes: Using familiar theological ideas, biblical passages and Christian doctrines, this book reinterprets them in a less familiar way. Subjects covered include Desire, Bodies, Sexual Difference, Marriage, Spirituality and Sexualities.
Review by Jane Fraser.
Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt
Richard Holloway
Canongate, March 2012. Hardcover, 368 pages.
Details / buy from: Amazon UK
Publisher's notes: The acclaimed writer, respected thinker and outspoken former bishop Richard Holloway takes us back through a life defined by the biggest questions: Who am I? And what is God? At the tender age of fourteen, Richard Holloway left his home in the Vale of Leven, north of Glasgow, and travelled hundreds of miles to be educated and trained for the priesthood by a religious order in an English monastery. Throughout the forty years that followed, Richard touched the lives of many people in the Church and in the wider community. But behind his confident public face lay a restless, unquiet heart and a constantly searching mind. How can anyone claim a complete understanding of the mystery of existence? Why is the Church, which claims to be the instrument of God's love, so prone to cruelty and condemnation? And how can a man live with the tension between public faith and private doubt? In his long-awaited memoir, Richard seeks to answer these questions and to explain how, after many crises of faith, he finally and painfully left the Church. It is a wise, poetic and fiercely honest book. As a portrait of an inner life plagued by doubt, it is unsurpassed.
Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense
Francis Spufford
Faber & Faber, September 2012. Hardcover, 240 pages.
Details / buy from: Amazon UK
Publisher's notes: Unapologetic is a brief, witty, personal, sharp-tongued defence of Christian belief, taking on Dawkins' The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great. But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true - because how could anyone know that (or indeed its opposite)? It's an argument that Christianity is recognisable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to ignore. It's a book for believers who are fed up with being patronised, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made. Fresh, provoking and unhampered by niceness, this is the long-awaited riposte to the smug emissaries of New Atheism.
Review by David Driscoll.
