Truth and Authority in Modernity

This book is a fantastic little submachine-gun-magazine of pragmatic ecumenical twenty-first century theology done as close to perfectly as we're likely to get - by Lesslie Newbigin, who I definitely need to check out more by. I'm going to hammer this one out really briefly because Newbigin is so kindly deft a writer that even a work as philosophically insightful as this 83-page banger can, I'd hazard to think, be summarized properly in a post short enough that I won't even need to scroll down during its composition. Though I've thought that before...

   Enough rambling!

   In part one, we are walked through the theological basics of God's authoritativeness; as well as various factors in modernity's suspicion of this. He then further explicates the external and internal means by which authority can be 'knowingly' affirmed; as well as linking concepts, faith, and grace - and by far the best Christian perspective on postmodernism that I have seen or read anywhere, hands down.

   In part two, he takes us through the conceptual & actual mediation of divine authority, which happens through four chief channels: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience; none of these can be fully ignored through conglomerations of the others, nor can anyone rightly expect divine authority mediated only through one or two to hold much sway.

   So then in part three, he finishes with some reflections on how Christians can attest to the truths of Christianity by mediating God's divine authority through these four channels, with some fantastically practical pointers given as to how to do this effectively in our post/modern contexts.

   Hey! I did it! A post that thought it would be short and was short! Seriously though, this should be compulsory reading for all pastors, preachers, Christian thought-leaders and whoever else. It's just jam-packed with applicable truth, and you can read it in a couple of hours. So you may as well take the full afternoon, and read it thrice.

Rainer Maria Rilke: selected poems

This book is the Everyman Pocket Library Poets collection of poems by the early-20th-century lovely lonely genius, Rainer M. Rilke (yes, the very same). Translated beautifully from their original German by Stephen Spender & J. B. Leishman, here are collected work from several of Rilke's own volumes and publications; six from The Book of Images, twelve from New Poems, his Requiem for a Friend, a small curation from between 1908 to 1926, a handful plus cut-outs from his longer pieces in the French poems, the whole series titled The Life of Mary, the whole Duino Elegies sequence, and a good 33 or so from his run of Sonnets to Orpheus.
   Any efforts by myself to try to cram a disrespectfully brief outlining theme, content, etc with regard to all these is already redundant; even translated (which I must again mention as the retention of complex & subtle rhyming schemes can't be an easy thing to do) some of these have gotta be among the most emotional, colourful, nature-bound, reverent, thematically ambivalent and humanly spiritually comforting that I've read in recent times and it's made me want to devour his whole oeuvre.

Look Out! It's the Wolf!

This book, written and illustrated by Emile Jadoul, is a charmingly cartoonish tale of a community of animals who are all warning each other that the wolf is on his way somewhere; [SPOILER ALERT] turns out all the other animals were throwing him a surprise party. Not particularly narratively interesting but given its target age of reader I don't see this as much of a hindrance as it's otherwise well-crafted and the pictures are the best bit for my money.