A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality

This book by Rob Frost was one of those I read with a classic almost-ex-evangelical mixture of cynical apprehension of heresy and roiling curiosity. I've borrowed it from the communal research & training library at work, and if the subtitle is anything to go by, it will live up to this mixture of expectations - as holism and psychotherapy I have no doubt Christianity is fully compatible with the ultimate findings of, but - ley lines? astrology?

   It's interesting from the offset to note that this book's author was in the same position as me when he began researching it. He wanted to debunk all the 'New Age nonsense', as is so much the trend in contemporary christian circles, but as he dug he found more and more commonality, potential insight into things like our relationship with nature and our own minds and bodies (which Christendom-form christianity often wasn't very good at talking about in healthily educational ways), and challenges of basic phenomenology that New Age mysticism is, in many ways, better-equipped to deal with than 'correct-theology' obsessed forms of modern church thinking, and therefore better able to connect with any persons or ideas outside of these modes and communities.

   There's a lot in this book and I won't pretend to bother summarizing it. I'm still on the whole retaining a broad sense of caution in approaching new ideas, but I've never been a shirker from them, and this has been no different - in many ways from reading this book I feel much more affirmed in the core sturdy reality of Christianity to respond to things we may perceive to be alien, but - do we really need to then perceive them as hostile? Or - is this going too far? - incompatible? At root, New Age thinking believes in the possibility of a set of practices and attitudes which can unite humanity and bring about a superior form of human civilisation. This potted summary, were it to contain a mention of Jesus, would also pretty perfectly describe Christianity's God-intended secular impacts. So whatever you may think about it all (assuming here that most of the readers of my blogposts about Christian books are Christian, sorry if you're not, God loves you btw), I'd recommend this book to any persons of faith who suspect grains of truth may exist anywhere else, to be discovered and brought into the larger whole which the gospel forms the core to. Because I certainly believe they do.

I Can Fly

This book by Fifi Kuo is just beautiful. I've bought it as a Christmas present for my very new niece Lily and, because it's very short, managed to read it before wrapping it. Replete with washy pastel illustrations that shiver with life & cold, the story follows a baby emperor penguin as they discover (much to their chagrin) that unlike most other birds they can see - they can't fly. But then... they learn to swim. A life-affirming, broad-strokes tilt at that elusive monster - the perfect children's book. If only Julia Donaldson and Lynley Dodd were out of the game, this one would be in with a shout.

Journal of the Unknown Prophet

This book, despite its title, is by someone known to be called Wendy Alec - and it claims to be a series of revelations pertaining to various End-Times matters during a visitation of Jesus Christ to her over a ten-day period in November 1999.

   If that sounds to you like mumbo-jumbo, let me assure you that my initial reaction was also of the same grotesque cynicism that characterises, quite hegemonically, our twenty-first century's general sociocultural attitudes toward "the prophetic" - which is deeply & systematically misunderstood; people know it has some general mystical or supernatural component but since the typical individuals' apprehensions of covenant relations with God are so corroded the true nature of prophetic ministry is completely unheeded and people seem to just presume it's a weird magical means of predicting future events. Or summat. 

   Indeed - for want of a better place to tell this story, I'm going to recount here something that happened to me over summer. I had the privilege of being part of my work's team sent to the New Wine festival, and on the penultimate night of my week or so there, I met a man in the bar area (whose name, to my fault, I can't remember) whose claim, during our introduction, was that he held and exercised a prophetic ministry. And despite having grown up in Christian environs - this was not a claim I'd ever heard anyone make. Ever. I was skeptical, and to be completely honest somewhat tipsy, and given the range of other things going on in my heart at the time in a very strange place spiritually - and so I met this claim with something akin to derision; but we talked at some length of what he meant by it, what this looked like for him on a day-to-day basis with his relations with and ministering to people inside and outside of Christian communities, and after the bar had closed and my colleagues gone to bed I found I was still talking to this man - felt in myself deeply convicted by God of my own ignorant arrogances of which I'm still trying to repent and decolonize: we prayed together around midnight as he tried to wrap things up to head back to his tent and he, during that prayer - said things about me that even I didn't know I knew to be true, asked God for things that I didn't realise I needed; ending on a simple request that through the providence of the Holy Spirit that I would be given "some connection" that would help me make sense of my walk with Christ at that stage. And nothing immediately happened, of course. But looking back - thinking through - this "connection" I think was something God had already been abundantly showering me in: to come to know, fully, humbly and joyously, the realities of Jesus's work made real through his accomplishment on the cross and re-enacted by his stumbling followers ever since - I've been blessed enough to grow up in a Christian household, and a very good church, and to now have a job I love literally studying the ongoing work of the Church in the UK to see how it can better see God at work and follow his will better - but have always felt in my heart somewhat spiritually bereft, homeless, driftwood-like: even having in the September of the autumn before the winter during which I started this blog I'd had, at a UCCF weekend retreat, feeling particularly keenly this alienation from the "felt" realities of my faith which seemed to flow so freely among my peers and worrying what was going wrong - I walked off alone into a field and threw my complaints tearfully toward Heaven; "why does this all seem so right to my mind yet feel so empty in my heart? why aren't you letting me feel whatever it is my brothers and sisters seem to be feeling when they thrust hands in the air during moments of ecstatic worship, or their voices break during prayers, or why do you even let me think these things and feel the nagging doubts that I am maybe surrounded by fakers, by superficial christian spirituality, or if it is real WHY are you letting me not feel it?" and during an earlier worship service on that same weekend we'd been prompted by someone at the front to think of our gifts, our callings, and I'd had no idea - the only thing I knew I was really good at was book-learning, and short of becoming a theologian there didn't seem to be any tangible means of using this to bless or serve the body of Christ nor aid in their missions: but following this prayer from this prophet, whose name remains unknown to me, at New Wine, it was gradually & overwhelmingly revealed to me how blind I'd been of God's own work in & through & for me - answering this prayer of lonely desperation, helping reform my mental, emotional and behavioural attitudes to bring myself fullerly, truerly, toward the Throne of Jesus with everything I could be & do: and thinking backwards reflectively over the nature of the workings of the spirit I began to see evidence of God's interventions everywhere in my life, ranging from the enormous upheavals like saving my life as a child through the NHS to the bizarre minutiae of things like the encounter that prompted me to read this book that would go on to radically shape the way I thought about God, humanity, creation, rationality and so much else at a time appropriate for these thoughts to impact my spiritual growth and intellectual development - and so much else, big, small, normal-everyday, weird: it became impossible for me to now not be able to look at life without some degree of a mystical lens to it, and if coming to the budding emergence of this element in my perspective doesn't qualify as an answer to the prayer of this man for some meaningful connection to manifest in my life I don't know what does.

   Anyway, other than all that - I've realised I've barely talked about this actual book. It's not an easy read, and this might be not an easy thing to believe but on reflection I think I believe it's genuine. Though now for having said that, I'd like to remind you that that means I believe this book to be a faithful account of Wendy's revelations from Jesus Christ himself - and given the magnitude of that it would be very difficult for me to talk about the contents of the book much without feeling obliged to go into loads of analytical depth cross-reffing it with Scripture and history and current contextual factors and whatnot and this post is, I'm feeling, already long enough, but if you've made it this far through without thinking I'm an absolutely insane person then perhaps this is the kind of book you'll grow somewhat or take something from.

Notes on a Nervous Planet

This book by Matt Haig is a punchily honest & disarmingly thoughtful series of reflections on how we can try to maintain our mental health in a world increasingly beholden by all of our modern era's weirdnesses, stresses, etc: drawing on everyday biographical snippets and pretty robust common sense this book skips around a lot but weaves together a bright cogent narrative of our Real Living Selves, navigating political chaos, new technologies, & all the myriad fuckeries these bring to bear on our poor battered brains. Personally I got a lot of encouraging ammunition from this book to apply to my own struggles with the stuff Haig* talks about here; I'd highly recommend this to anyone similarly looking for some kind of individual stability and reasonableness throughout the bluster that is becoming of this fucking decade.

* Btw it is indeed same author as this fantastic novel, which in itself was inspired by Haig's own disassociative experiences with extreme depression & anxiety, as further unpacked in this other more testimonial work.

How to be a Bad Christian... and a better human being

This book by the brilliantly irreverent Reverend Dave Tomlinson is as it says on the tin. As per its opening quote - "a Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and has at least some dim, half-baked idea of whom to thank" - this is a deep dive, though written with excellent simplicity and accessibility, into what it actually means to be a Christian - with a no-holds-barred-approach to calling out the bullshittery that we so often allow to proliferate in Church communities, setting up expectations or dogmatic stringencies that either aren't there or shouldn't be held as the defining elements of Christianity that they are - because Christianity is, and only ever has been, all about Christ - and that's it. And that facilitates an outrageously generous worldview that is, as Tomlinson found in his own ministry and I have experienced in my own sojourn, just sometimes sadly absent in its full realisation among the very people purporting to practice it.

   This book is an incredible gift to the Church's missional momentum: stop taking ourself so damn seriously, take Christ seriously and take him out there into the world with us. I've been doing a lot of reading & thinking about this over the past year and what it might look like in ways I've never quite dared to let myself imagine, because of the evangelical ideological constraints that are part of the particular Christianity I've grown up in; can we really be saying we're trying to imitate Christ if we're not willing to call out the religious authorities and blind-spots of our own age, as he did? can we really consider ourselves to be servants of the King if every invocation of Christ's Kingship leads back into the same old circular argument about "the now and the not yet" instead of leading us to joyously and daringly insist on trying to make it the now? why should we expect people who have never had reason to find sacredness in the material trappings of our own faith to do so, if we have barely even started to put in the time required to listeningly look at places in which they may be seeking the sacred, wondering why, and responding discerningly with love and hope? and how can we be seriously expecting people to get excited about, or even remotely curious about in positive ways, models of Church community life that do very little to meet people where they're at and facilitate inclusive creativity, or that re-tread the same ground every Sunday talking about the divine peace of knowing God which is celebrated by the sabbath but the very weekly maintenance of such an ongoing rotational responsibility for both preacher and preached-at seems to bestow little if any meaningful restfulness amid the busy noise of our culture, or which seems to be bogged down in almost obsessive managerial planning of discipleship courses or theology lectures or etcetera because the lived, real relationship with Jesus is so seemingly stultified that such options are the only real route the church leaders look to be able to manifest when it comes to thinking about their future?

   These aren't necessarily questions that Dave asks or answers in the book - he covers a lot of ground and I would rather give you a feel for its gist than attempt a summary. But if any of what I've said here resonates with your own experience of the Christian faith, whether you think of yourself as an adherent of it [regardless how "good!"] or not - then I reckon you'll find much of comfort and affirmation in this book. Though if I'm honest, the people who'd really benefit most from reading it are exactly the kind of Christians who probably wouldn't anyway because the title pissed them off... which is kind of Dave's point.

Yorkshire Wisdom

This book, edited by Joe Moorwood, is a reyt good compilation of quotes from all manner of folks from God's own county. Ranging from famous'uns like Alan Bennett, Judy Dench, t'Bronte sisters and Jarvis Cocker* - and also, for sake of maintaining locally-apt respect for t'common people, a selection of particularly wise-sounding, witty or just damn well-n-truly Yorkshire quotations, apothegms, axioms, one-liners, etcetera from folks you'll've never've heard of but I'll tell thee now they know what life's about. Great depth & breadth of variety in themes, content, whatnot - this'd make a grand present for pretty much anyone as you don't have to be from the best place Earth's got on offer to keep a smallish almanac of wisdom from there as a toilet book or summat.

* Who for my bargaining has the best range & writ of wurbage in here, though I'm probly biased.

THIS ISN'T MECHANICAL & DOESN'T REALLY KILL ANYTHING PROPERLY

This book is not one I am going to say very much about at all, apart from that I wrote it. A full pdf of the first edition (of which one hundred printed paperback copies have been procured from that wondrous old thing The Internets) is available through that link, and in years to come I will probably look into developing and unleashing expanded versions of the book aforementioned. If you think the title is silly by the way, you're damn right.

The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump

This book by Rob Sears is an absolute gem. Extracts from those endlessly articulate, baffling and mental-gymnastical goldmines of the mind of its 'author', be these speeches, tweets, or just things he's said on TV or in interviews or whatever - are lovingly chopped up and reconstituted into really quite tremendous poetic formats. The net result is fucken hilarious - made moreso by the diligent referencing of each quote-snippet so we can fact-check each and every word, phrase & ramble just in case one wanted to make sure Sears wasn't crafting all these himself and we, the readers, could truly trust that what we read here are indeed very much the words of the man himself - and while he maybe didn't put those particular bits of words into those particular orders, the resultant poems are deeply and beautifully emulative of Trump's truest and biggest public persona, with all its nuance & complexity, all its humbly-acknowledged flaws & profound reflective wisdom. Seriously - a book worth engrossment for any who perhaps have not seen the quieter meditative side to our current Excellent President, as this book will enlighten as much as entertain.

the Incredible Book Eating Boy

This book by Oliver Jeffers was presented to me recently by my dad recently, with the accompanying snide remark "it's about you". Keen to disprove him, I read it in a short sitting this evening, only finding before I wrote this I had to text him to confirm his initial comment. You don't care about such biographical rambling, I'm sure.

   Anyway, it's a story (with chunky cool stylised illustrations, and the version I've got has a range of innovative pop-up sections, which no doubt younger readers might find even more exciting than I did) about a boy called Henry who starts eating books, develops a taste for them, tries to eat as many books as he can because he wants to be the smartest boy ever, gets sick, slows down his eating habits, and discovers he enjoys reading rather than eating the books.

   So back to the abstruse bio-commentary - it's not really about me, because I've never eaten a book. Nor do I (any longer - though for a period in my late teens and early student days this was certainly a fair cop) feel there is much point trying to read as much as possible to try to be a particular kind of cleverer or better. I read to broaden my horizons bit by bit in all manner of ways, generally quite a lot slower than followers of this blog might expect. I think maybe then it is about me anyway, only I'm at a stage of life where I've already learnt the lesson Henry concludes this plot with; reading is great, don't go mad. A good one for the budding bibliomaniac kids.

Holy Listening

This book by Margaret Guenther dives into the mystique and fuzziness around the term 'spiritual direction' to draw out clear guidelines as to what it is, where it can happen and how it can happen well in these contexts, and what people should be sensitive to when being given or attempting to give spiritual direction. It has the feel of a book which packs an intellectual punch (as, it does) but is eminently readable, practical, and resists obtuse theorizing, always coming back to the relationality of the people involved and God above. While this will not be discussed at length in my summary/commentary below (as to those who see the linkages it will be obvious enough and for those who don't I can't justify elongating this blogpost into yet another feminist-theology polemic which probably won't convince anyone of owt anyway, or even, wouldn't if people read this), there is a final chapter exploring some of the particular strengths of women in giving spiritual direction to both genders.

   First - what is spiritual direction? Guenther talks about it in a very nuanced and person-centred way, so it is almost certainly an oversimplification for me to say this, but it is basically the process of helping another person, whatever stage of faith they are at, best discern ways in which God is calling them to do or be particular things, whether that is to become a Christian at all or pursue particular ministries. Needless to say this process will involve deep committed listening, both to God through scripture and the promptings of the Holy Spirit alongside the person themselves in their own complexities and context.
   This process (described in the book's subtitle as an 'art', which resonates) is then discussed in three distinct but complementary and in places overlapping roles or forms;

• Hospitality - through showing it, unconditionally and inclusively, we help create real spaces and times in which people can be themselves authentically, and so draw out underlying aspects of character or need which can then be responded to. Also in the doing of this we model the love of God for all peoples.
• Teacher - in developing questions and gently leading conversations to the suggested answers given by God, we help inform and direct people's thoughts, and thus actions and so journeys, more into line with an overall narrative from Heaven which is fully transcendent over all earthly knowledge. Theology here takes a backseat to will.
• Midwife - as elements of people's character and life-journey lead them closer to the core of questions they are wrestling with, closer to God, closer to particular kinds of ministry, etc, through the combined processes of deep listening, open conversation and nurturing mutual exploration, a spiritual director can help a person 'birth' their own realisations of certain things and so empower them toward new paths.

   As I've said, there is a final chapter on the speciality of women in this kind of activity which, while I will not discuss here, I think says a great deal of potent common-sense on the ways in which listening and mutuality are life-givingly important, yet which because of patriarchal sociocultural structures and norms men (who still dominate the clergy) are generally less well-equipped to do.

   In any case, if you are a spiritual leader who is to any degree responsible for the souls of people under your care, then I would wholeheartedly recommend this book, as it contains many highly insightful stories as examples of how it can be done well, badly, in-betweenly, how God uses both people to sharpen each other, how the very process itself can be wholesome in the practice of discernment over dogma.

It's a Book!

This book by Lane Smith is a brilliant exercise in getting kids who can read to get even more excited about the mere activity of reading. It revolves around a series of anthropomorphic animals who don't recognize what a book is, though by the end, surprise surprise, they do. Not particularly gripping or innovative despite its promising premise, and still I'd reckon worth a punt as a gift for kids under 7 you know who like books.

Inspector Smart & the Case of the Empty Tomb

This book, by Michael Tinker (and, outrageously, illustrated by me) is an exploration of the probably-well-known-enough-that-a-summary-here-isn't-necessary story of Jesus of Nazareth, in particular his rising from the dead, despite the fact that Roman centurions were notoriously good at making sure people who were meant to die died. It takes the shape of a mystery - with Inspector Smart, the lead detective, interviewing witnesses in the Judea region to build a better picture of what went on.

   I can't sing the praises of this book's illustrations too wholeheartedly because I did them* and they're not brilliant but they get the story told. Writing-wise this is I think a clear and innovative retelling of the classic core christian story, that makes it compelling to younger audiences. That said I think this book would probably function best as an apologetics primer for small Christian children - but it could still prove an entertaining read for non-believers' families who enjoy mystery and intrigue.

* I'm still waiting for my royalty payments for the Inspector Smart branded mug which was released at some point over the last few years that says on it "He-brew", which is a great pun as well as probably the best tea in Israel... I know they exist, I haven't said anything, I don't really mind or care. It's cool to have some part of my work succeed enough to make it onto a mug, so there's that.

the Snail and the Whale

This book by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler (yes, the very same duo who were behind the Gruffalo) unexpectedly hit me right in the feels. I read it to a child from church,* and it seemed to go down well, which I can only partly attest to its quality as a children's book because I'm an incredible read-out-louder. That said - the text is rhythmic and flows aloud perfectly, and is even occasionally a bit funny, the plot is genuinely quite compelling, the illustrations are beautiful, the friendship between the two main characters thoroughly heartwarming. A classic.

* For those of you who suspect this is just another excuse for the fact that for an intellectual 24-year-old I read a lot of children's books, yes, you, shut up.

the Imitation of Christ

This book is well-known as claiming to be the second most widely-read/translated book in our history after the Bible itself - I can't speak as to the veracity of this claim, but the pragmatic spiritual density of Jesuit monk Thomas á Kempis's text herein may merit such a reality were it so. It's broken down into short, digestible but highly potent chapters - and I've been reading it extremely slowly, giving each chunk time to permeate through reflection, prayer and other reading; there is so much in here that I found of immense help on my walk with God, and I would hopefully expect that it would likely be so for others too. A big thing I think I've learnt through the book and surrounding experience is that of the nature of Christian catholicity - that of course being the innately-designed one-ness of the Church established by Christ and maintained through the Holy Spirit's movement among his apostles ever since... it's not been entirely comfortable, you know? I've realised elements of the christian culture I've grown up in, and whether this is things deliberate or not but certainly latent to enough of an extent in the Protestant evangelical normativity I'd taken for granted as the "right" kind of Christianity - this just doesn't hold up to its own desire for hegemony of truth when properly and humbly compared to the realities of value found running deep through the "other" churches. Especially now having to have had to reconcile my upbringing with working at an Anglican charity, having met and learned from Anglicans, Catholics, and other kinds of christian that until recent times I'd kind of just presumed to be lost causes, or at least misled. I feel extremely convicted that a prolonged period of decolonization needs to be undertaken - this is already to real degrees something I've been trying to do with regards to racist & chauvinist attitudes, but I think the over-segregation of small ideological shades within Christian traditions is likely just as harmful and deep-set a prejudice of such kinds - perhaps not one directly linked to as many obvious social repressions or structures, but certainly things that less than fully glorify the God who calls us into his body, and so it is something of which I am trying, bit by bit - to repent. Even if that means venturing into territories whence my brothers and sisters might start considering me the same kind of heretic I'm trying to stop "seeing": I'm not sure where this path leads. But I know Jesus walks it with me; so I will try to step well and without anxiety.

A Philosophy of Walking

This book by Fréderic Gros is, as the title suggests, a philosophical stroll through the nature and psycho-biosocial mechanics of, and historically-significant figures associated with that simplest human means of locomotion. Or should I say perambulation? Probably. It deals in utter magnificently eloquent terms with the silences, solitudes, slownesses and strangely metaphysically inspiring spaces found when one walks: Nietzsche, Nerval, Rousseau, Kant, Rimbaud, Thoreau and Gandhi get their own chapters examining the purposes and uses of the "art" of pedestrian travel; I'm fairly sure the book was written as such that this shines through the text but it may be a facet of just my own over-egged poetic reading, that the book works even more fantastically than it presumably still does otherwise should one take the whole notional field of "walking" as the metaphor for the dogged, day-by-day, step-by-step human travel through their own life - I certainly found it yielded many insights personally that were not necessarily there in the text itself with a grasp of such in the halfway-back of my mind. I loved this book and you can very probably expect to see a second post on here about it in the years to come, on the inevitable re-read.

Markings

This book is compiled from the private spiritual journal of Dag Hammarskjöld, who was a devout disciple of Christ & the UN's general secretary from 1953 until his untimely* death in 1963. It became an instant classic, having been translated masterfully from the Swedish into English by Leif Sjöberg and poetically refined by W. H. Auden; indeed, the edition I've got boasts a foreword by Jimmy Carter (and if you don't think he's the greatest of all living ex-US-presidents what the hell are you doing on this blog!?).

   My lighthearted tone notwithstanding I am under no allusions that this is a potently holy and worthy book.** Dag writes of struggle, of joy, loss, hope, grief, God, Christ, the world and its fullnesses & emptinesses, justice, equality in the deepest sense, truth, peace - all mediated through a poetic but totally honest presentation of his own soul, bared in lonely prayerful discourses as he bears the gigantic blessings & burdens of his humanitarian role and seeks to undertake it in action as perfectly informed by his Christian contemplation as he can possibly manage, by the grace of God. I defy anyone to read this book and come away unchanged. It's been an incredibly humbling, emboldening, fortuitous vägmärk on my own road of think-reading my hazy way across a life of faith, and I will be returning to it for nourishment and encouragement many times more throughout my journey, I'm sure.

* And actually really quite suspicious, but that's a story for another whole documentary.

** It went onto my 'to-read' list some eleven or twelve years ago, my dad having been lent it by a man with whom he had had a long conversation about faith and life and stuff & on asking what book if any was indisputably the most powerful to change one's views on such my dad came home with this, and reading the blurb I remember thinking "wow this is too much for me but I'll flag it for when I really need the spiritual fuel" and I'm Glad I did.

Jesus' People: What the Church Should Do Next

This book, by ex-Bishop-of-Sheffield Steven Croft, is a punchy, well-put, highly accessible and relevantly practical reflection on the nature of church and how it can or should be rising to meet the challenges currently facing it in this country.*

   At risk of overly simplifying what is an edifying and biblically deft read, his answer to the titular question - what the church should do next is exactly what it always has been meant to be doing, only with renewed unity, zeal, and diligent service. So - helping people from all over the place encounter personally the God of love by a variety of means, and building meaningful communities of these people around discipleship, which (because I know it's churchish jargon but I'm about to define it okay) essentially means encouraging and holding each other accountable to making Jesus the model of our lives and beings.

   Simple, right? You'd think so. Then why do Christians keep churning out endless books about problems in this process or ways to overcome them, when according to generally orthodox belief all the answers are in the Bible anyway? I don't want to say I can't answer this question but I can't be bothered to type it out, nor risk such a rabbithole of potential theological debate bursting out in my comment sections, because as we all know this blog gets millions of passionate readers.

   As a final comment - this book does also contain a really timely endnote on the current challenges of integrating 'fresh expressions of church' into the pre-existing and largely staler (sorry, everyone) economy of congregations, which is not in itself an overly useful or interesting bit of text but should go some way to pointing many churchfolk in useful and interesting directions.

* I won't discuss these in much particulars here, as I already put myself through far too much stress-inducing thought into such questions for my day-job.

Kobane Calling

This book is a graphic recount by Italian artist Zerocalcare and translated into English by "RB" - dealing with events surrounding what is happening in Northern Syria, or Western Kurdistan, at the moment - given the revolution that's going on there. If you don't know much about it then this short comic might be a good introduction, as it does take the whole situation seriously and goes some way toward being of educational value. However if you find yourself wanting to go deeper into knowing more about the Kurds & the things going on in Rojava, may I point you toward my Masters dissertation where you may well find what you're looking for in the bibliography. As a comic though this piece works in its format really well; I love the art style, and the visual atmosphere it maintains gives a real edge to the subject matter - the battle for Kobane itself, where YPG-YPJ forces held the city against Daesh - is dealt with appropriately respectfully and the story told in the pages of this slim volume does end on a hopeful note, as I'd like to think we can say of the story of the Kurds generally some day soon.

&

This book is the debut pamphlet of poetries by Jonathan Kinsman (who as well as being founding editor of the cracking journal Riggwelter Press runs the Gorilla Poetry spoken word events I've been frequenting), which is literally so good it won the Indigo Dreams prize for poetry pamphlets. I don't know how they judge these things or what & was up against but to me it seems like it probably deserved to win whatever the case.

   & is a collection in which poetic language use is pushed to its fullest, drawing out huge emotional sprawlings; where the connectivities of selfs, others, words, objects, feelings, actions, and the intangible moments of choice and uncertainty which peg all these components of reality together are pinpointed with a deftness of phrase that would be uncanny if you noticed it (which you do upon re-reading, such is the craftspersonship), which you might well not because the headspace these poems pull you into, with an at once intimate and yet detached immediacy, is deliberately kept fluid - you follow trains of thought and narrative which sometimes meander gently, sometimes twist sharp corners and skid off toward a previously-unseen horizon, always providing an exactly right space in which the poems unfold in their self-contained entireties. As such it's the longer ones which I would pick as favourites if I were in the habit of doing this (which regular readers will maybe know I'm not); iterations of self and it's like this are just superbly subtle and poignant as they go on, recursively exploring an amount of conceptual nooks and crannies to a poetic subject which you probably couldn't come up with yourself in a solid hour of coffee-fuelled brainstorming, and here Kinsman neatly encapsulates all these variegations and ruminations in (one would think) impossibly concise and breathtakingly potent nuggets of verse.

   It goes without saying I enjoyed this pamphlet a lot. If you want an introduction to perhaps one of Manchester's most interesting new up-and-coming poets, look no further.

Life Together

This book (available for free as online pdf in that link, you're welcome) by Dietrich Bonhoeffer* is probably among the most concise, helpful, practical, gracious, context-flexible and biblically-rooted explorations of Christian community I have ever read. In five short readable chapters exploring the nature of community, the typical or ideal day when with others or alone, ministry, and confession and communion, Boffers offers us a rich and life-affirming gospel tapestry of where our selves and relations may go wrong, and how we can try to help them go right by being truly grounded in Christ - individually and togetherly. A must-read for folks in church leadership & membership alike.

* An incredibly inspiring man in 20th-century Christianity who was martyred by the Nazis for opposing their - being - well, Nazis, I guess. Also the person alongside whose name I was first ever introduced to the term theologian, because Tim Chester's cat was named after him and obviously this demanded an explanation, because "Boffy" is a weird name, and even weirder when you're told what it's short for.

Socrates: A Man for Our Times

This book is a biography of western philosophy's foundational figure by Paul Johnson - and my goodness, is it excellent. Dealing with his ideas deftly, and embedded in their original contexts, he brings the man to life that even Plato barely manages to fumble; the picture painted of ancient Athens, the raw challenges of Socrates's credo that one's life should be examined, directed with meaning and purpose, that it is open at all points to moral or intellectual challenge for not living up to its own purported standards; his monotheism, his reputation as a soldier and athlete, and statesman of the democratic society - or how these images of the man were skewed by philosophers and playwrights toward ulterior political or cultural ends after his willing submission to the death penalty for his "blasphemies"; even his amusingly-sketched relationship with his overbearing wife and their life of happy poverty - this is historical biography done to perfection, thoroughly entertaining to read but you can virtually smell the rigour of research on every page and I learnt more about Socrates through this one book than in that whole module of ancient Greek philosophy that - actually, now thinking about it I didn't take when I was an undergrad... OK maybe I'm thinking of Keanu's refs, but you get the point. Anyway, one last punt - the subtitle; Johnson does throughout pepper the text with considerations of how the life & thought of Socrates parallels those of numerous other thinkers across the history of western life & thought - and though in my view didn't expand this as fully as I'd have liked to see does draw some really interesting contemporary application points out of it all. Definitely worth a read for anyone who's a fan of philosophy, history, or both.

the Physics of Star Trek

This book by Lawrence Krauss is, as the title suggests, a hard-thunk scrutinizement of the biggest & best elements in science fiction, through the particular lens of Gene Roddenberry's creations, to see how well, if at all, such things square up to the realities of actual existing scientific reality as we understand it. As someone who's generally found it somewhat of a mind-mangle to get the general laws of physics into my head anyway, but loves science fiction, I actually found myself learning a great deal about actual real science from the derived applications of this book - Krauss writes extremely clearly and is a brilliant educator on his subject - which shouldn't be a surprise, the man's an eminent professor, not just your average Trekkie who's done a wikipedia trawl degree. Oh, did I mention there's a foreword by Steven Hawking?

   In terms of content it's split into three broad chunks: the first dealing with wormholes, relativity, "warp"-speed and all that quantum spacetime jazz; the second dealing with matter - thus by extension the implications of teleportation, holograms, and whatnot; and the third a more deep-speculative dive into theories around alien life-forms' possible, and probable, existence.*

   I really enjoyed this book - as mentioned I learnt a lot about physics from it, and all in rather practical ways, as my motivations for reading it was primarily research for my own science-fiction story that I'm working on. But I'll not toot that horn here - this book I'd give a hearty recommendation to anyone with a healthy skeptical approach to pop-culture and enjoyment of scientific learning, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it all to closely to most Trekkies unless they're also intellectually humble enough to have numerous what might be sacred cows diligently and systematically sacrificially dissected before their very eyes...

* Though, with apologies to Roddenberry's ghost, Krauss does conclude much alongside my own personal gist that should we ever discover or encounter extraterrestrial life - it seems thoroughly unlikely that they will look & live Pretty Much Exactly Like Homo Sapiens but with Different [ears/skintones/foreheads/etc] and [x/y/z] Cultural Quirks.

Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity & Integrity

This book by Christine Korsgaard is quite possibly in my top three or four philosophical books I've read, period. I had read sections of it alongside this a few years ago when I was doing an undergraduate essay on conceptions of agency in practical reason, earmarking it as a book to revisit and properly digest later on - this time not for mere academicalism but to properly imbibe of and benefit from the potency of insights she makes herein.

   Synthesizing ideas from Plato, Aristotle and Kant, alongside her own formidable weight of intellectual reflective handling of such diverse themes of psychological behaviouralism, the questions of what makes a person effective at being a person, how we respond at all to things like goodness or rightness; the ground covered here is incredibly holistic in scope and yet holds together into a cohesive train of argument that never dithers on the fences of empty philosophizing but consistently returns to the fertile soil of pragmatic, day-to-day human lived application - which is what all true philosophy should be and do, imho. I'm not going to pretend a cogent synthetic summary of the ideas contained herein is at all within either the intentional or possible parameters of my writing this post, but to give a roughly hazarded breakdown of what I think she's getting at in this book - it is the very question of what it means to live well, how a human person can conceptualize themselves in practical ways in relation to ideas about goodness and reason in a world so often devoid of either in the immediate circumstances; and how constantly choosing to cultivate one's own identity in line with notions of goodness, rational truth and whatnot ultimately shape the meaningful essence of our identities - how well we do this developing what she refers to as our integrity. She does shine some excellently critical lights into the murkier what-if corners of our failures to do this as well - with such problematic elements of human being as ignorance, moral failure, and incoherent aspects of our constituted beings all being dealt with generously and in my opinion rather satisfactorily. One small gripe I would take with it is that she deals primarily with autonomy and agency in these senses with regard to the individual, and so much of the kind of organic intersubjectivity that shapes, for good or ill, our capacities and efficacies in the pursuits talked about in this book aren't given the scrutiny I would have been keen to hear her delve into - but this is a small trifle when one considers how much truly helpful ground she has otherwise covered - no doubt that side of things is something she has talked about elsewhere,* or may someday.

   As you'd probably guess from an Oxford University Press book, it is pretty dense reading and though Korsgaard writes excellently and this is much more accessible than a majority I think of typical books in this kind of ballpark, it would still be a bit of a hard go for those who haven't delved previously into the mindfields of psychological philosophy - but I'd say probably most people seriously willing to give their brains a bit of a workout could handle this book relatively easily, so long as you don't expect it to be the kind of thing you can just bash out in a few afternoons, and are happy to google the occasional word. And yes, I would very much recommend this book to basically anyone as the insights contained in it are so life-givingly pragmatic and reasonable that it would be an excellent book to anyone - so if you'd like to take the plunge and give your own grasp at being a coherent person a long hard thought-stare, I heartily recommend Christine Korsgaard's work as a springboard - and though I can't say I'm a scholar I'm confident enough this is a good starting point.

* I am speculating here - sadly, as I am no longer a student of any university, my access to philosophy books is now considerably more limited, as they're bloody expensive, and they won't let me in the student libraries with quite the same degree of welcome as I once had.

We Go to the Gallery

This book, from the Dung Beetle reading scheme,* perfectly encapsulates the roaring depths of alienation, ennui, spiralling existential dread and general sociocultural anxiety with which one's consciousness, upon introduction to their subjective-conceptual limits of artistic and philosophical meaning, becomes afloat with a taste of the transcendent, develops metaphysical and aesthetic and spiritual curiousity, only to be caught up in the westerly winds of modernist and postmodernist and all-the-other-too-manyisms-in-between airs of creative thinking blown across history and so left stranded in the vast stormclouds of the absurd which roll across our contemporary global attention span, shrinking as it is.

In it, Susan and John go to an art gallery with their Mummy, who explains the art to them.

* In the way that those Ladybird spoofs took off, this is the next level of spoof: the Dung Beetle learning books are "designed to make scary subjects approachable for the under 5s. Printed in bold colours and written in clear, simple English, each book will drag families into the dark recesses of the collective unconscious, for their broader cultural benefit," as their incover-page-blurbage attests, and even if this book is the only one they have thus far published it certainly more-or-less achieves this stoic promise. I can only apologise for the lack of accessibility employed in the verbiage of this post, it being a purely accidental side-product of my efforts to write quickly and concisely (which I then undo whatever relative efficiency that that may have allowed by farting off down pointless corners of discourse like this, but nevertheless -) but basically I think this book is as clever and funny as it is bleak and ridiculous, and could make a great present for the right person. Bearing in mind it is really not a children's book in the classical content sense.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book is the first that I've reread since already having read it originally since January 2014 and thus done a blogpost about, and therefore now has two blogposts about it - for some degree of non-replication-efforts the link there just leads to my previous post about it. I recommended it as the reading for the New Roots Radical Library's reading group, which if you're a Sheffield-based lefty looking to self-educate further among friendly conversational local peers I cannot recommend highly enough, but perhaps underestimated how much readers of this would have to sort of understand Kurdish sociocultural and geopolitical context in order to the points to fully stick. As such, I found myself somewhat awkwardly in a sort of seminar-facilitator role to the discussion (and as the reading group is meant to be a non-hierarchical open knowledge-sharing space rather than didactic learning, this both was and wasn't problematic).

Readers may have heard of Anna Campbell, who was killed by Turkish forces earlier this year fighting in solidarity alongside the YPJ in Afrin; she used to study at Sheffield and volunteered at New Roots, so this discussion in its up-to-date context was quite close to home for those who knew her, but also a deeper surge for the prompting of anyone who in these turbulent times we live in sides with freedom and justice, feminism, socialism and ecological consciousness - if she believed in these ideals enough to die for them, the least we can do from our deskchairs is openly support them. Please donate!

the Presence of the Kingdom

This book by Jacques Ellul needs very little said about it because it quite completely blew my mind, not by introducing me to new ideas but essentially because it represents a total synthesis of all of what I thought were my most radical systems of ideas I'd encountered and grouped into some kind of holistic critique of modernity but expressed more succintly (not to mention logically) than I would ever have been capable of, and grounded fully and richly in a rigorous exposition of the dynamics of God-headed Spirit-led discipleship rightly understood in opposition to the worldly powers of the twentieth century. No single book* has quite so entirely both affirmed and challenged my personal state of thinking and living. If every church leader read this and digested its truths, there would be an utterly unprecedented surge of repentance from congregations who have conformed too far to comfortably stand against sin; a return to Scripture to listen to Jesus' cry of forgiveness for those lost in the condemned pits of modernity. One of our greatest western prophetic thinkers, to be sure. Partly why I'm writing such a short post about it - it's one of his earliest books and is described as laying out his general systemic viewpoint, and so I will certainly be digging into further detail of his perspectives through others of the many books he wrote.


* As ever with these hyperbolic statements about Christian literature; except the Bible.

You Can Change

This book by Tim Chester (available as a free digibook from that link) is one I'd read once before as a confused fifteen-year-old struggling to properly engage with or enjoy life as a Christian, which in fairness continued to broadly define my habitual over-intellectualized theological education masquerading as a genuine spiritual life until relatively recently, or arguably is ongoing and will only be peeled back layer-by-layer of exactly the same basic lessons and then attempting, failing, againing, to put them into practice... It's a book about sin, redemption, hope, and has an incredibly challenging but helpful focus on observable patterns of behaviour as well as emphasising trying to listen to and respond with abundance of truth-reminders to our own thoughts and feelings. Having re-read it, personally I think it may be one of the most potent, emotionally and psychologically realistic, sinners'-life-affirming yet wholly-holiness-concerned Christian books I've read; and it is thoroughly and delightfully biblical. Anyone, pretty much, struggling with anything, I would recommend read this, as it takes you through a rigorous but generous questioning discernment process that unavoidably leads to practical considerations and may well spark the renewals in feeling, thinking, doing or being that you perhaps are held back from living life in fullness and joy by. This book is hard-hitting but sensitive, honest, and fundamentally rooted in the grace of a good & glorious God.

A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind

This book by Shoukei Matsumoto was as disappointingly materialistic as it was wishy-washily platitudinous. I'm not sure what I was expecting from a book with a title like this, but it pretty much is just comprised of a list of possible chores and household maintenance tasks appendaged with cloying and repetitive discussions of how these particular tasks, performed with attentive deliberation, mindfully and carefully, can (enormous surprise) help the cleaner develop meditative states and attitudes. This is not something that anyone who's ever done a thorough spring clean needs explaining - I was hoping that this book would shed some deeper insight into Zen Buddhist philosophies around material objects and stewarding them well, perhaps also cultural or psychological nuggets of interestingness as to how one may approach these tasks in such a way as to bring about such states; at the very least partial repressedly-angry tirade against Western society's lazy-affluent carpet-hoovering torpor. But no! Aside from the pleasant regular illustrations and the occasional spots of discussion which do actually acknowledge the global historical contexts of the advice contained herein (many of these are couched in sections included apparently to sole aims of explicating a certain item of Japanese home cleaning-ware), I'm sad to say it's hard to describe this book as anything more or less than a list of domestic to-maybe-do's padded out with samey almost-ironic-in-their-extremity-of-sincere-mundane-devotion* broad generalisations associating housework with purity, love, life, enlightenment, and all that jazz. I'll finish with a selected quote to show you what I mean: "Dishes must be carefully held in both hands. Holding things in this way displays a sense of natural sophistication and shows that you take care of each and every thing you hold." So, there probably are some people who would enjoy this book, but for me, in a cruel twist of fate it has become one of the few of my acquisitions to have been updated in its material-possession status - to clutter.

* Is that maybe just what Zen Buddhism is like? And if so, is this whole post xenophobic?**

** Maybe it wasn't until I asked this in an asterisk!? Oh dear, what a minefield.

Making Disciples in Messy Church

This book by Paul Moore is an excellently concise, accessible, affirming, practical, and thoroughly biblical discussion of how Messy Churches are meeting people at different points on their journeys of exploring, discovering, and developing faith. It's bookended by a helpfully balanced consideration of what discipleship is (which lemme tell you, as a member of a team who've been trying to define this while we've been studying Messy Church, is not easy), how this can be maintained through Christian community, sustained and encouraged at homes, and made workable in ways inclusive of all various ages, with solid pepperings of example practices, activities and so on to give messy discipleship roots in the hearts of attenders. The intervening chapters dive deeper in scripture to look at what discipleship, or following God's plan, looks like in the Old and New Testaments; and while by no means deviating from being anything less than a brilliant layperson's resource in terms of non-jargonfulness, there is a great richness of theological weight in these and often consideredly related to the on-the-ground realities of running Messy Churches. A great little book, both for those involved with Messy Church who want to think through how to make it churchier without changing its nature, and for those maybe sceptical of Messy Churches as being viable vehicles of Spirit-led growth and renewal. There will be learning points for anyone in church leadership here.

Confabulations

This book, by the brilliant John Berger (who, as one of the blurb-comments here attests, handles thoughts the way an artist handles paints), is composed of a series of short not-quite-essays more-than-reflective-passages poetic prosaic perfectly constructed  - now, how to describe these? assemblages of words and punctuation, interspersed with occasional images, designed to gently peel back onionskin layers of everyday taken-for-granted real and normal and prod through the porous membranes of pond-rippled personal and collective memories to feel the conceptual textures by which these just-about-communicable nuggets of human experience become slanted or skewed as they disperse in social and cultural forms most varied and beautiful and mysterious. Their topics range from Rosa Luxemburg and songbirds to orphan mentality and Charlie Chaplin to eels, clouds, and many many many things far too importantly deep-and-wide that single words particular to the expressed label of them simply do not exist, and these things can (insofar as language or art can grasp them at all) only be seen in peripheral vision, only be known by intuition, only be heard with imagination; if this all just sounds like guff, it's because this is a far easier book to read than it is to explain what it's about, as Berger's pages echo with profundity and clarity of intellectual heart as they take us to confront some urgent and essential basic, yet utterly mysterious, truths.

Notes on 'Camp'

This book is a Penguin Modern re-publication of two essays by Susan Sontag, the titular Notes on 'Camp' and One Culture and the New Sensibility; both are densely thought-provoking but quite readable and very short (I read both in one go while babysitting for my younger brothers). It's difficult to summarise what she's talking about without being grossly reductive: both are very broad and deep essays, and though their main focus is the nature of consumed creative-cultural content, the ways in which this has notably changed through history is discussed with a deftness and nuance that is hugely enriching given the wealth of social, political, economic, technological and psychological trends and concepts which she brings to bear on this infuriatingly intangibly unanswerable question - that of, what is art for? And therefore what constitutes good taste?

   'Camp' may be rudely described as that which is 'so bad it's good', but only raises more questions about what good meant in the first place, and therefore how something might be perceived as bad, and ways in which ironic or detached (yet still wholehearted, more-or-less) enjoyment of such a bad thing might make it be perceived as a sort-of-good thing, but when others then try to emulate what makes these bad/(good?) things bad/(good?) it either comes across as pretentious or it lowers the bar. Either way, for all the surgical meditations on the user's aesthetic experience which Sontag lays out here, the questions underpinning both essays are far from settled philosophically - and given the rapidity with which culture and our technological means of consuming or engaging with it continue to change,* I'm not sure there is much more than a few grains of truth about these painfully convoluted realms of intersubjectivity to be found throughout this essay. That's not to say it isn't a thoroughly interesting springboard into the basic outlines of these as things to think about though.

   Anyway, the second essay is much more objective - instead of trying to lay out clear guidelines for what constitutes 'camp' taste, she here explores the shifting role that art plays in affluent post-industrial societies with mass communication technology. The brute accessibility of pretty much everything has broken down the barriers between 'high' and 'low' culture, argues Sontag, leading to a frenzy of experimentation with forms and media that see art increasingly calling itself into question through its very self, in a combination of content, style, and context; things are no longer created as timeless artifacts for the proven taste of aristocratic norm-wranglers, but are fluid, self-aware, daring - in ways which mirror the development of science as a continual force progressing by learning from and building upon itself, so art is increasingly created not only as singular entities but as ongoing collective ruminations on meaning, ever being deconstructed and reconstructed afresh for new audiences or in response to new events or to take opportunity of a new means of creating a particular thing...

   I will end here, as this is a topic I could probably spool on about almost indefinitely, and at the very least I don't want to write a post longer than the book it's about.

* An amusing testament to this is that most of the pop-culture references she makes, being from the early sixties at the latest, went straight over my head. Which, in fairness, is likely part of why I didn't find her range of points as comprehensively convincing as I might have.

Being Messy, Being Church

This book, edited by Ian Paul, is a collection of essays exploring Messy Church, and was another of the books I've finished as part of ongoing reflective reading in my job at Church Army's research team. My personal reflections on it all tie in strongly with other reading about church and discipleship and stuff so if you're interested have a peruse of other posts - I've also been condensing my applied reflections from each chapter into note forms which are all in my desk at work, and I'm writing this at home (weirdly, I've not yet asked if they'd mind me taking an hour or so every time I finish reading something at work to then write a blog post about, so) - thus this post will, in thorough contravention of its title and themes, be straightforward, simplistic, neat, and will not invite collaboration or participation from or with any of my other thoughts on any other books. In fact, it barely constitutes more than a copy of the contents of the Contents page.

• A foreword by Lucy Moore (who founded the Messy Church [MC] movement).
• An introduction by Ian Paul about the ongoing vitality of the MC vision.
• Karen Rooms on MC in different contexts.
• Isabelle Hamley on teamwork and developing team members' faith in MC.
• Greg Ross on common challenges and pitfalls to MCs.
• Jean Pienaar on making sacred spaces in MC.
• Philip North on MCs and the sacraments.
• Sabrina Muller on MCs' appropriacy for the postmodern world.
• Mark Rylands on the conversation between MCs and 'traditional' Sunday churches.
• Judyth Roberts on MCs' playfulness.
• Irene Smale on the pastoral implications in a MC.
• Tim Sanderson on evangelism in MCs.
• Stephen Kuhrt on the challenge on discipleship in MCs.
• Tim Dakin on missional structures for missional outcomes (applied to MCs).

   To close this dishearteningly* boiler-plate post, I will add that despite the lack of depth with which I have discussed them here, these essays are deeply insightful and thought-provoking, and I would hold this book up in recommendation for anyone involved in church leadership or organisation - especially churches that look a bit like, or that you feel God is telling you could or maybe should look more like, Messy Churches.

* At least, I dare to presume that someone might have found it so, if they happen to both (or either) be a follower of this blog or an enthusiast for Messy ecclesiology/missiology in pursuit of online resources to find out more about these - well for one, I'm hazarding on the assumption that these two circles maybe don't overlap much (especially given that the first, if the people in it are real at all, is tiny) and maybe the secondary assumption that if there is such an overlap then whoever's in it probably wouldn't be that disheartened if I flappingly apologised for the uselessness of this post knowing full well that it isn't useless properly if it points them toward a relevant book.

Poetry, Conspiracy and Radicalism in Sheffield

This book, edited by Hamish Mathison and Adam James Smith, well - I spied it in a lefty bookstall in the Winter Gardens and knew from the title* that it was a book I needed to read. It's a collection of poems printed in the Sheffield Register, a more-or-less radical (in that it espouses basic civil equalities and liberties) paper that was hush-forced out of existence in the late 18th-century.**

   There are ten poems, mostly published anonymously or under pseudonyms: they deal with matters ranging from slavery and the (still quite young in 1793) British abolitionist movement, income inequality and the corrupting power of wealth, the futility of patriotism in a country fighting a war which made no sense to the common people, the fundamental necessity of individual freedom to think for oneself, and such things. The poems vary a great deal (considering they're all from the same city in the same couple of years during the early onset of the Romantic period, that is) in style and tone, with some being borderline polemical and others veering playfully into ironising or picking up metaphors and running off into the horizons with them; also, each poem is discussed in a short reflective essay later in the book, placing its content and themes into social and historical context so as to better explore their potentcies and intents. There is also a longer essay about Joseph Gales (who founded the Register) and his apprentice who was also an influential poet James Montgomery (who later also founded the Iris), their work and its impact on the artistic side of things but also how meaningful it was for the establishment of publicly-available socially-conscious information in the form of non-conservative newspapers; Sheffield has a deep and strong history of progressive grassroots movements and the work which the contents of this book barely scratch the surface of has a significant place in the history of my city's development of such a community tendency. Finally, there are contained in appendices a handful of readers' letter to the Register, as well as another two poems, and some speech extracts and editorials by Joseph Gales and James Montgomery both.

   Excellent little book.

   By means of explicating my personal reflections on this book, see the asterisky bit, and note that I have since finishing it not only found myself experimenting with writing poems that actually rhyme, I've even [self-censored in case any deep-state intelligence agencies are surveilling this blog to find out what I, a known rampant (if relatively eloquent, and, some would even venture as far as to say, well-informed) anarchist, am up to on the whole subversive collective action front]. Just joking. I'm going to a fracking site next Friday but I was doing that anyway before I read this book and it's hardly my first encounter with that kind of thing. I have however written a poem about fracking in a similar style to one of the poems in this book, which I will not hesitate to whip out into action should I manage to trap one of the rig-site staff in conversation. That's how you get to them, you know.

* Poetry is my craft, radicalism is more-or-less my politics, Sheffield is my home, and who doesn't love the excitement of a good conspiracy from time to time?

   I'm properly just on a hype for the intersections of these things at the moment anyway - there's an exhibition in Weston Park Museum about Sheffield's over-200-year history of radical collective action movements, and another in the Millennium Galleries about the power of art and activism drawing on and enriching each other. I'd feel spoilt - if I enjoyed it for its own sake only, but such delightful overlaps remind me of the call to action that creativity is; art which is not perceived with moral-political consciousness becomes mere production/consumption rather than the gorgeous messy explosive collaborative dialogue about what is true and beautiful and good and what this means for us; art which is perceived with moral-political consciousness, even if it wasn't necessarily created with the same, gains the capacity for inspiration beyond abstractified*** arguments about detectable stylistic influences or liable auction values - inspiration for concrete acts of moral-political creativity, which of course take place in the grandest medium of all, human society.

** Fortunately a more tentative (but with just as much emancipatory intentionality in its long-term sociocultural subversiveness) paper, the Sheffield Iris, replaced it.

*** Is this a synonym for bourgeois? Not sure I'd stretch that far, but maybe.

Tim the Tiny Horse at Large

This book, by none other than esteemed comedian Harry Hill, isn't that funny or good. I'm literally at a loose end trying to work out who it's for. It's not accessible enough to be a kids' book, it's not subversive or compelling enough to be a jokey adults' book, and it's not edgy enough in either direction to be some kind of Young Adult genre-blender... here Hill seems to have told a story that is, while vaguely entertaining in general, has very little of substance to offer any particular audience, and I'm struggling to think of any means by which it genuinely endeared itself to me - I mean, I did laugh, or at least chuckle, once or twice,* but more out of the total non-sequitur of its whole devising** than purebred wit or characterful comedy. Ah well.


* For my money the best bit in the whole book is the chorus of the lullaby Tim sings to a maggot he's babysitting: "Oh where are your parents? / They can't be that much longer! / It's doing my head in / I'm never having children / If it's like this"

** Tim is a horse roughly the size of a bee, or perhaps a small mint. His best friend is a fly, called Fly, and he later acquires a pet greenfly called George.

the Screwtape Letters

This book by Clive Staples Lewis is an indisputable classic of modern popular theology. It's comprised of a series of thirty-one letters* written from Screwtape to his nephew, named Wormwood - both being eternally employed in the demonic art of tempting humans into sinful states (seemingly an industrial effort concerned with harvesting souls for tortuous consumption by those same demons).

   All these letters comprise advice and criticism on Wormwood's work (he being a junior tempter) on the life a particular English everyman during the Second World War - Screwtape's advice, being the intentions of an efficient devil, reads with a topsy-turviness that is consistently disorienting yet refreshing in its clarity of perspective on human nature and weakness; it is as clever a book as it is simple, as funny as serious, and even through the backwardsness of this choice of voice Lewis's insight into spiritual-moral efforts in people's lives rings loud, warmly darkly and sharply challenging to the reader as the letter's contents penetrate so incisively the contours of the general conscience.

   I cannot recommend this book enough.** For Christian readers it will be an entertaining, humblingly realistic and intellectually playful reflection on the life of a disciple; for those of other faiths (or none) its meditations on the subtleties of influence and growth in personal harmony will still probably to a considerable degree still ring true, exposing the absurdities and dangers of leaving ourselves on auto-pilot.

* Plus final text of a speech Screwtape makes to a dinner party audience of fellow senior tempters; an elaborate toast to the capacities of human tendencies to make their work so much easier than it could be.

** Quite literally, it seems.
   This is the third time I've read this book (previously when aged fifteen and nineteen) but the fourth copy of it I've owned - it's one of those which I recommend with such enthusiasm, and which other people have heard is worth reading so much, that they keep getting lended and forgottenly kept. Fortunately copies are commonly attainable from the second-hand section of Christian bookshops for £2 or less, which makes this process of occasional informal spiritual resource dissemination actually pretty viable on the whole.

Holistic Learning

This ebook by Scott H. Young (available for free online through that link) is very short, very readable, and offers a simple and potent introduction to some of the principles of, as it says on the tin, holistic learning. This is basically a whole approach to education which forms frameworks of understanding with a fundamental expectation that things within these frameworks, and even the frameworks themselves, will be interconnected, once you find out enough about them or the objects of their understanding. This is radically at odds with the conventional model of modernistic education, which breaks the world down into fields which one has to specialise in further and further until you can genuinely struggle to find ways in which people who effectively study the same thing from different perspectives can find common ground upon which to discuss the things they both study, because breaking fields down and compartmentalising information and understanding is not conducive to cross-pollination - which means you have to sort of decide to become a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none before you can start linking things into some kind of bigger picture. It's challenging, and frankly given the sociocultural and political-economic order currently prevalent I don't see the models of education (which are deeply reductive; subjects become mere information for the sake of specialised career paths, and I don't see genuine self-driven collaborative free-thinking learning stuff pushed very far in most educational institutions today*) changing much very soon. But hey, big picture, things are changing all the time, particularly quickly and unpredictable at the moment, so never say never. I'd strongly recommend looking through this book if you want some genuinely helpful tips that will help you cultivate an approach to learning which will help you do it naturally and organically all your life; maybe like me you're lucky enough to already have that kind of approach to learning, maybe you know it's within your potential but schools and college and whatnot never unlocked your capacities for curiousity to enough of an extent for you to really get into the swing of it. But it's never too late! Well, unless you're in some kind of vegetative state, in which case good on you for managing to read this blog - and watch out for bedsores.

* The Philosophy and Politics Departments at the University of Sheffield (where I undertook half** my undergraduacy and a part-time Masters in Global Political Economy) being thankfully something of an exception.

** The other half being economics, to which the above critique was entirely fair.