the Divine Dance

This book by Richard Rohr (same author as this gem) is a deep, circular meditation on the Trinity and its mysteries. I honestly don't really know what to say. It's about God. His nature, his ineffable Being, his goodness and eternity and light and givingness-of-life. Rohr manages to blend a thoroughly ecumenical scholarship in simple language through a lens a pragmatic, humanly-livable concepts and frameworks, so that we can start to grasp how God moves and how we can try to join in once we accept the call. This is a marvellous, beautiful book. One thing I will say as a plausible downside is that it doesn't really have much of an apologetic bent - but that's fine, this is a book for believers who want to draw themselves further into the divine dance anyway. If you are looking for ways to share the glorious mysteries of the Trinity with non-Christians in your life, then this book will probably be of use anyway, as it may be so fruitful to your spirit that your come closer in your soul the the heart of the heavenly rhythms and find the things to say or do that will bear appropriate witness anyway. I am somewhat hesitant about marking this in the category of "Christian theology" even though I know it is - but it just feels so messy and casual, like the Holy Spirit has just charged through my lounge with muddy boots and tossed a fishing-rod onto my couch and said "got nothing! gonna check the raccoons have got out of the well, see you in a bit" and stomped straight back out through the back door - what do you even do with that? That's this kind of book. It shows you a glimpse of how big and active God is and invites you to be part of that. It's the kind of book that makes Trinitarian theology not some abstract philosophical exercise but an exhilarating spiritual ride that takes you from Yes Please to Eternity and wherever in-between. I would highly recommend this book to any and all Christian readers.

Jesus Feminist

This book by Sarah Bessey was a breath of truly fresh air. Although I have read several great sources on Christian feminism before, never before have I seen so many coherent and powerful arguments put together in one place, and not to say the least all tied together through the lived Gospel experiences of Christ himself in the women he interacted with. I'm saying very little about this book because I want you to go and read it yourself. If you are a Christian with concerns about feminism for whatever reason - I implore you to read this book and pray deeply about how Christ might be speaking to us about what gender is and is for. If you are not a Christian and may even hate the faith for ways in which it treats women - I also implore you to read this book so you can come closer to the heart of Christ who knows and loves all, and so that you can be better equipped to throw rebuttals at your Christian friends next time you have an argument about gender. A brilliant must-read.

Politics and the English Language

This book - well, rather a long essay - by George Orwell, has become something of a talking-point across the political spectrum in recent years, for interesting reasons. The right seem to think that it upholds their stance against "politically correct" speech policing, while the left seem to feel it upholds their idea that all too often vague populistic and non-committal speech is supplanting public honesty. Exactly where Orwell himself would have lain in this argument we will never know, as he's been dead for seventy years, but still people on all sides of all political spectrums love to claim this man who fought for an anarchist army against Spanish fascists is on their side.

   I'll quit rambling. This is an essay about vagueness; the ways in which the English language can be made flimsy, indeterminate, in order to couch the political ambitions and goals of the speaker - regardless of their ideology. Some of the most insidious ways in which this happens are dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. If these terms mean nothing to you then I suggest you click on the link at the very start of this post and read the free-online .pdf of this very essay so that Orwell himself can elucidate you. After explicating the ways in which these linguistic tactics can be used to obfuscate and befuddle, Orwell goes on to retranslate a passage he had quoted "in political language" earlier into normal, honest English - and the differences are quite startling. Even as someone who was a keen student of linguistics at college, I was startled at how much of a difference can be made pragmatically to the same semantic statement through a handful of minor tweaks. But all of this is moot. The world has moved on a great deal since Orwell passed on; we have been living in the "post-truth" era for about eight years now, and I dread to think what George would make of the political-linguistic landscape if he could see it today.

   Read this if you want for historical curiosity. It's a somewhat interesting insight into the past evolution of populist propaganda-speech. But it won't help you all that much in navigating the shitshow that is how politicians use language today. Unless, that is, you trust them, in which case, God help you.

That Hideous Strength: How the West was Lost

This book by Melvin Tinker I am going to deal with incredibly briefly. I know that its author is the father of someone I consider a friend so this may come back to bite me in the arse but I have to be frank. This book was written by an ignorant coward who was more concerned about farting out a book about "how to be a distinctive Christian in today's complex landscape" than they were about actually finding a fucking map or compass. There is virtually no theological content to this book that you couldn't get from Sunday school, and there is virtually no intellectual content to this book that you wouldn't find on PragerU. 25% paranoid anti-intellectualism, 30% anti-LGBT rehash with zero context or point, and 45% zombified hand-wringing about "cultural Marxism". I genuinely feel that C.S. Lewis would be slightly sick in his mouth to know that a book so ignorant and reactionary was written in the name of one of the novels he was proudest of. If you're not a Christian I guess you might read this for straw-man entertainment. If you are a Christian, I implore you to be better than to read shit like this.

The Erstwhile

This book is Brian Catling's sequel to the incredible fantasy novel The Vorrh, which I raved about. The reason it's taken me several months to finish a book I was extremely excited about is something you may have picked up on in the post about its prior instalment - this is a very hard series of books to follow. Not to swallow - as with its predecessor Catling's prose herein is of the utmost calibre in imaginative flights of darkness, beauty, horror and bizarreness. So as with the first book in the trilogy I can't, and even if I could wouldn't for want of spoiling such a fresh experience, tell you exactly what is going on in these books yet.

   Again, fantastical elements of this biblically-overgrown alternate version of Earth history are blended together with real historical bits, like William Blake or the Bedlam insane asylum. There is at least one thing I can tell you of what happens in this instalment with certainty. As the colonial settlers of Essenwald continue to plunge deeper into the Vorrh, they are beginning to disturb long-dormant strange creatures: these are the erstwhile, the angels who were given by God the task of guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden when humanity had been yeeted from it. However over the millennia, with the growth and thickening of the forest, they have lost their purpose, and in many cases their minds; most burying themselves in the ground and going to sleep. But now, as the Europeans disturb ever closer to the heart of the forest, they are waking up. And doing, to put it mildly, weird shit. One of these erstwhile has ended up in Bedlam, and makes friends with a German doctor who is visiting to investigate a tangential matter. Honestly, that's about all I can say with much surety. It certainly feels like things are drawing together loosely - plot elements overlapping increasingly and variably other characters from differing strands of the prior story crossing paths or conflicting unseen; but as with the first book this is an enigmatic novel and a half. Still beautifully-written though. Catling has a knack for describing actions and expressions or inheritances with a turn of phrase barely three or four words long that punches you in the brain's language centre so hard you wonder how you had never heard that combination of components used before, now it seems so obviously apt.

   As with the first book, a strong recommendation to any and all readers willing to get a bit lost. But be warned. If you spend too long in the Vorrh, it starts to affect your mind...