Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels, James DG Dunn Eerdmans, £13.99 Simply Jesus, Tom Wright SPCK, £9.99 (Kindle £5.99). James Dunn and NT Wright have both written major scholarly works on the life of Jesus but they are also both gifted with the ability to distil their scholarship in to readable, popular books. They have an [...]
Food and Faith in Christian Culture Edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden, Columbia University Press, £55 hb/ £18.50 pb Alone among the major western faiths, Christianity has by and large laid down no unvarying dietary strictures for the ordinary believer. Members of monastic communities may have been subjected to particular regimens, often depending on [...]
Predicament of Belief, Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp OUP, hb, £16.99 As the authors recognise, some readers of this book will be disappointed by how much of traditional Christian belief they are ready to jettison while others will be concerned at how much they are prepared to retain. They describe their position as ‘Christian minimalism’, [...]
Firmly I Believe and Truly, John Saward, John Morrill, and Michael Tomko OUP, hb, £35.00 According to the editors, Love’s Redeeming Work, an anthology of Anglican writing, served as a model for this anthology of Catholic spiritual writing in Catholic England between 1483 and 1999. In the light of this it is interesting to ask [...]
In War of the Worlds (Authentic Media Limited Publishers) author, Adrian Plass tackles the difficult questions and hardships that come into play when trying to balance the physical and spiritual self. Fusing humour with poignancy, Plass delves into the sensitive nature of humanity’s questioning and despair and emerges with hope and comfort through convergence of the spiritual and [...]
From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin, DG Hart Eerdmans, hb, £16.99 Once again religion is having an impact in an American presidential election. Evangelical Republicans can’t warm to Mitt Romney, partly because he is a Mormon. Rick Perry kicked off his campaign for the Republican nomination with a prayer meeting attended by 70,000. Michele Bachmann [...]
Mark A. Noll: Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, Eerdmans, hb, £16.99 Mark Noll is a leading American church historian who became famous twenty years’ ago for a book accusing his fellow evangelicals of having no intellectual interests. Together with books by another American evangelical, David Wells, on similar themes, Noll’s The Scandal [...]
Divine Humanity, David Brown SCM, pb, £50.00 ‘Kenosis’ is a term used to describe the idea that in the incarnation God the Son accepted the limitations of human existence and ceased to exercise divine powers. A real change took place as Christ exchanged equality with God to live as human being. In this stimulating and [...]
Reconstructing Early Christian Worship Paul F Bradshaw SPCK, pb, £16.99 This scholarly book consists of nine essays on the early development of Christian worship. It includes three chapters on the Eucharist, three chapters on baptism, and three chapters on prayer. Almost all are revised versions of essays available elsewhere, often in relatively inaccessible publications, so [...]
Heaven on Earth, Richard Landes OUP, hb, £22.50 “Although millennialism has always proven wrong in its apocalyptic expectations, it has rarely proved inconsequential or unproductive,” Richard Landes tells us in this fascinating survey of millennialism and apocalyptic beliefs. One of Lande’s major themes is that historians have too often ignored the importance of millennialism. [...]
