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.