Unapologetic

This book by Francis Spufford is, despite his claims that it isn't an apologetic as it makes zero effort to engage with classic philosophical arguments for or against any particular theological claims, by far and away the best Christian apologetic I've ever read. I've literally just read the whole book in a single sitting* it's that good. The subtitle proclaims it as an exploration of "why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense" - and to say it achieves the goal of making a case for this with aplomb would be a grand disservice to the word aplomb. It runs its course over eight perfectly-structured chapters:

1. a general introduction; statement of intent for the book
2. the existential experience of sin, or as he translates it the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up
3. the frustrating ineffability of God in light of people's recurrent sense of needing, if not Him, then something to fill that gap
4. the confounding problem of suffering
5. the personality, teachings, mission and passion of one Yeshua from Nazareth
6. the historically improbable paradoxes surrounding the emergence of Christianity as a coherent religion
7. the complicated legacy and situational state of the Church
8. the subjective feeling entailed in having faith that one is forgiven, and the challenges and opportunity implied herein

   It's deeply insightfully clever without being scholarly**, bewilderingly matter-of-fact in what it says and completely down-to-earth in how it says it, balancing common-sense public presumption with personal but universally recognisable experiences and dazzlingly original points that lead him into compelling conclusions without ever making anything that so much as looks like a rational argument. Spufford not only doesn't avoid the prickly areas of conversation around Christianity in its contemporary context but actively leans into them and tries to give them as much benefit of the doubt as possible, and somehow still manages to wrangle cogent and meaningful ways of sidestepping or outright neutering them. He writes with a disarming simplicity and a refreshing honesty that if such style was wider emulated by Christian authors (and indeed everyday evangelising believers) I hazard to expect that we would see a great many more folks showing interest in the faith.

   Overall, this is a more-or-less perfect example of communicating Christianity effectively in a postmodern culture. If we are presumed by the world around us to be irrational, then give up on trying to convince people by reason - and talk about what it feels like to have one's messy spiritual life wrapped up in what never has been and never will be scientifically verifiable but is indisputably salient in its psychological cohesion to those who try to believe it. If you're a Christian, read this and be inspired to draw on your own emotional experience to communicate your own faith more fluidly, with less intellectual trumps and more confounding expressivity. If you're not a Christian - this book won't convince you to become one, but it may very well provoke you to give it a bloody good consideration.

* With minor breaks only to piss, smoke, and make more coffee.

** Spufford humbly boasts in a note at the end of the book that aside from checking to ensure the accuracy of certain factual claims and quotations used, he conducted exactly no research whatsoever throughout his writing process.

Renewal as a Way of Life

This book by Richard Lovelace is a guidebook for Christian spiritual growth. It is a condensed version of Lovelace's prior book Dynamics of Spiritual Life, but also entails an extra seven years-worth of reflections and learning around individual and corporate renewal, so it goes beyond the original in many regards.

   The book is split into three main chunks. Firstly, in exploring the normal Christian life, we consider how our lives are to be centred on God and His Kingdom; here we are given the "preconditions for renewal", those being an awareness of God's holiness, expressed in His love and His justice, and a complementary awareness of the depth of sin both in oneself and in the world. Orienting one's heart and mind in these ways is the root of sustainable and renewable spiritual life.

   Secondly, we look at the unholy trifecta of phenomena which constitute the "dynamics of spiritual death": those being the flesh, the world, and the devil. This middle section of the book is chock-full of practical insights into discerning when & where these are at play, and then navigating around or through them as we continue living under & for God.

   The third and final section explores the dynamics of spiritual life. The first chapter in this part dives into the Messianic victory of Christ and its explosively potent implications for followers of Jesus; the next two chapters dig deeper into how living out these implications manifests in firstly individual and secondly corporate (church) renewal. In these chapters we are introduced to the primary and secondary elements of renewal. Primarily, through faith in Christ as individuals we can be assured that we are accepted by God (justification), free from bondage to sin (sanctification), not alone thanks to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and granted authority over the spiritual powers of evil. Secondarily as we live in the light of these assurances we can follow Jesus into the world, presenting his gospel in proclamation & social demonstration (mission); we can depend on the power of the risen Christ in solitary & corporate prayer; we can enjoy community in the united body of Christ on micro- & macro- levels; and we can ever-more-progressively have the mind of Christ toward both revealed truth & our own cultural contexts by integrating theological learning & practice.

   I got a lot out of this book. It's accessibly written & consistently focused, leaning on the orthodox essentials without getting bogged down in theological corners; it's thoroughly Biblical throughout (with a Scripture quote or two on almost every page) & never tries to do more than it claims to be aiming to. Each chapter is closed off with a half-dozen or so discussion questions, as Lovelace does mention in the introduction that this would be an ideal book to work through with a small group of fellow disciples, and I imagine that doing so would be an incredibly fruitful experience, but so is just reading it to yourself. This is a book that does not make light of how difficult the Christian path can be at times, but it steadfastly instils confidence that if we have our eyes, hearts & minds attuned to God-in-Christ we will continue down the path of renewal until we are called home.

the Spirit of Life

This book is the fourth of Jürgen Moltmann's series of contributions to systematic theology, this one dealing with the Holy Spirit's nature, character, and activity. The book is subtitled "a universal affirmation" and it delivers on this promise, as I will expand on later. For now, let's go through a rough outline of its contents - after a brief introduction discussing contemporary approaches to pneumatology, the book is split into three main parts:

1. Experiences of the Spirit - starting with a consideration of how God, being immanently transcendent, is experienced through experiences of life itself; then how the Spirit has been experienced historically, as divine energy, through God's people, the Shekinah, and messianic expectation; and finally Trinitarian experiences reflected in Christ's own spirituality, the spirit of Christ, and the mutuality between these two members of the Trinity.
2. Life in the Spirit - here we deal with the spiritual vitality of life; the liberation aspect as the Spirit bestows freedom upon its subjects; the justification aspect as the Spirit brings justice to victims, perpetrators, and structures; the regeneration and rebirth themes; the holiness which the Spirit helps people grow into through sanctification; the specific charismatic powers that the Spirit bestows upon select individuals and the purposes of these; and lastly how all this fits into thinking about mystical experience.
3. The fellowship and person of the Spirit - we first look at experience of fellowship and how this is interpenetrated with experience of the Spirit, how this is expressed in Christianity, and how loving relationships embody a social experience of God's being; then move onto ways of describing the personality of the Spirit through a range of utterly inadequate but humanly helpful metaphors (grouped into personal, formative, movement, and mystical), the streaming divinity of the Spirit's personhood, and how this fits together with various conceptions of the Trinitarian schema [the final section of this last bit takes a bit of a left turn to consider whether the filioque is a superfluous addition to the Nicene Creed or not, which is a bit detached from the rest of the book but in such an ecumenical sequence of ideas it's good to have it in there].

   So clearly this book covers a lot of ground - and the same caveats as I've given in previous posts about Moltmann's books apply here. But that subtitle, "a universal affirmation", truly does describe the overall bent of this book: while it is densely academic in style, to grasp the thrust of the arguments being made is to genuinely be held close in the encouraging embrace of the Holy Spirit as that which loves and affirms life in itself - I've labelled the post for this one "spirituality" not because it offers anything new or innovative to the Christian experience of spiritual life but because it so deeply and roundly affirms the goodness and the dependability of the basic facts of the Christian life insofar as it is spiritually experienced. The world these days is all too often dark and confusing, and much of the time I find it hard even with my faith to look to the future as the site of many tangible promises for human flourishing; but this book has done more to restore my trust in God's ineffable brilliance and unpredictability and love for that which is recognisable yet new, fresh, surprising, than almost anything else I've ever read. If you're only going to read one book out of Moltmann's contributions to systematic theology, I'd make it this one, as it will give you an identity statement and modus operandi for arguably the most mysterious member of the Trinity, that will deepen your cognizance of God's work in the world and your life, and broaden the intake valves of your heart for abundant security of hope and joy.

Rumi: Selected Poems

This book is a collection of poetry by the 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic Jalal ad-din Rumi, or simply Rumi as he is more commonly known.

   I went into this book expecting majestic, mysterious uniqueness; and I found it. Rumi, it is claimed at least by the blurb inside the Penguin Classics edition,* is the most-read poet in the contemporary United States of America - which I honestly found quite a shock given the friendly terms Iran is currently on with that country. I guess people who read poetry are generally more forgivingly open-minded? Anyway - the Penguin Classics edition, which I read, edits the whole of Rumi's multi-volume masterwork the mathnawi into twenty-seven thematic chapters, with themes ranging from Bewilderment, Emptiness and Silence and Being a Lover to Art as Flirtation with Surrender, Recognizing Elegance and Jesus. As a Sufi, Rumi believed that union with God in His divine loving nature was achievable to the willing and dedicated soul, and that belief shines through on every page of his poetry - there is an affirmingness there, a love of all that is human and authentic, almost to a fault. Many of these poems are tongue-in-cheek; lots are genuinely funny; many deal with profane matters; several are genuinely pornographic (there is one very graphically memorable one involving a donkey and a makeshift sheath); many more deal in explicitly religious terms with the struggles of human life and consciousness, of love and hope and loss and fear, of union and separation, of discovering and keeping one's place in the world or even simply of wondering where that may be. All are beautiful and worth reading.

   I don't know enough about Sufism to confidently discuss my reflections on this collection of poetry in religious or spiritual terms, but as poetry, as pure voice that uplifts and echoes the human spirit, I can confidently say that this incredible man is worth reading.

* Translated and edited by Coleman Barks, and also, for some reason, including an appendix with half a dozen random recipes.

the Soul of Wine

This book by Gisela Kreglinger is an entertainingly readable, life-affirming and impressively moderation-levelled introduction to the spirituality of wine. She - coming from a winemaking family - has a deep and rich appreciation for the dimensions of life that the juice of the vine can bring out in human social relations, and she has shared with us in this short book a powerful testimony of what this can look and feel like. I was shocked at some of her theological statements but taken poetically I don't think there's anything in here that all but the most ardent of teetotaller-Puritan Christians should really be bridling at. Jesus loved wine enough to not only develop "a reputation" among the Pharisees but even instituted the sharing of wine as part of his own disciples' maintenance of their relations with him and each other - i.e. the Communion - and as such we should think not drunkenly but drinkingly of the Spirit as the gift of life that it is, given to us to share in the abundance of all good things that God has given His Creation - and call me Bernard Black but I've always held good old fermented grape juice as being one of those higher gifts. You know, like cheese, with crackers and olive paté. A recommended gift book to Christians who like a glass or two. Not a recommended gift book to those struggling with over-drinking, as it will likely just send them into Rasputin mode.

Rumours of Another World

This book by Philip Yancey is a masterfully composed, Biblically grounded and refreshingly open-minded take on Christian apologetics. Instead of dealing directly with Christian claims and how the world tries to refute them, Yancey begins with the premise that there is more to life than the mundane material lets on. He then leads us through a winding series of arguments tackling some of the biggest blockages against our as natural beings' shortfalls in perception of life and the universe's supernatural elements: the false gods of money, sex and power cloud over much of this reality by demanding God-level attentiveness from their soul-sold devotees, and we get stuck in ruts of finite perception, ignorant of the infinite love and goodness on the "other side" - this despite all Scripture over its history aiming to create and maintain communities deeply rooted in the practice of perception of such Otherness - even believers construct walls to keep out the less-than-neat-or-easy elements of supernatural being.

   I'm using lots of hyperlinks to make points in this post as the themes of this book tie into a lot of things I've read already, but moreso since Yancey's writing style is itself full of "hyperlinks" - he writes extremely accessibly, this is far from an academic slog of a book, and references to previous chapters or other things he's written criss-cross almost every page as he builds us a picture of the unseen Coming Kingdom of Christ - a picture rooted not in human institutions but the communications of a great and absolute God who loves us and desires us to know His goodness first hand. Through the intimations of poetry and work of the imagination we can take steps toward this all-filling spark of creativity and mystery that is the eternal Godhead, who is far closer than most presume to the beating heart of pop culture just as much as the dried-out flakes of gnostic "faith" in what we do not yet know fully - perhaps never will or can know. Some things are God's knowledge and no human mind ever needs to be big or complex enough to comprehend them, and as beings of an amphibious nature, that is we have both bodies and souls - we should be okay with this reality. Only obedience in faith ultimately helps us find the spiritual oases - and only grace will redeem us at the end of history, whenever that may be for us personally.

   This book is a powerful communication of the Christian faith, but philosophically speaking there is a lot in here to pique the interest of skeptics too. I would commend this book to those who are maybe new to spirituality and have no intrinsic reason to doubt or distrust the Jesus traditions - not that there aren't sometimes good reasons to be wary of such - but on the whole it is my experience that life with Christ in it is richer and realer and more enthralling than life without, and so I would hope that in the spirit of receptivity people would not dismiss the supernatural things in our world without at least trying to taste-test them to see what sticks.

Enjoy your Prayer Life

This book by Michael Reeves (same great author as this) does what it says on the tin: it is a hearty and helpful guide to diagnosing whether and why one's life of relational prayer with God may, or may not, be flourishing at any particular time in your life. Readers of this blog will not be surprised that maintaining a strong lifestyle element of prayerfulness is, I think - fundamental to my personal flourishing and joy.

   It's a very short book, in fourteen bitesize chapters: I finished it over a single coffee. Any normal reader could likely do the same, were they not taking the time-outs to think over what they've read - as I didn't feel much need to, as it rather just revivified in affirmation of my actual IRL views on prayer anyway, grounded well in Scriptural theology as you'd expect. Helpful reminders from this book include:

• Prayer is not a magical formulaic means of "getting summat" from God
• It is merely asking God for help with that which we cannot resolve
• Our prayers to the Father are conducted through and by Jesus
• Intentionality of resting in Christ's name gives our prayers a "pleasing fragrance" when the words reach the heavens; and all prayers are answered, though we might not always recognize these when they come as God's wisdom exceeds our own understanding of right and Need
• Ideally, prayer should be done constantly - that is, in that it becomes an added layer of consciousness to those practicing it, in all things; not just ritual verbiage
• Total dependence on God through Jesus's accomplished work is the best method for achieving constancy of prayerful mindfulness; it is the antithesis of "independence"
• Obviously, the Holy Spirit guides much of all the inner workings herein
• So be honest - for God sees you as you truly are
• And trust in Christ's promises - that as we pray in and with Him we will be brought ever deeper into God's bosom; in joy, understanding and obedient love

   And so on.

   Hardly the kind of book that would be necessarily enticing to someone who doesn't think God is real or good or whatever - but as a Christian pilgrim, this is worth a read. If you're able to afford it - it's probably worth buying a few dozen copies and handing them out to all your Christian mates/acquaintances. In any case, I have left my (somewhat dog-eared, soz) copy in the Trewan Hall bookswap library.

Living Dangerously

This book, edited by Alan Jacobs, is a collection of extracts from the speeches & teaches of Osho, also known as Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh - a man who were it not for this excellent netflix documentary series I wouldn't have heard of probably. As you'll know if you've seen the doc - things got strange; but as you'll know if you're read this blog much - I love it when things get strange, and I'm always happy to suspend disbelief a bit when the lines between genuine wisdom & odd cultic dogma seem to be blurry. So, without making any judgments whatsoever - I decided it wasn't worth only having an impression of the man's life and/or philosophy without actually exploring some of it directly rather than just via a probably-somewhat-dramatized retelling of all the juiciest highlights. And my verdict is - I mean, my personal jury's still out on the nature of the cultic community his ashram turned into, but in terms of his actual outlook and ideas? The man makes some excellent points, which are highly uncomfortable to hear for anyone from settled ideological perspectives: his reflections on the nature of meditation, modernity & the mishap-overlap in-betweens therein are some of the most striking new poignancies I've heard from any thinker on the subjects of mindfulness and modernism, and much of the rest of his philosophy in my view does bear striking similarity to the clarity of insight and quasi-prophetic character of properly, dangerously enlightened thinking. That's not to say I necessarily agree with him about all the things he said - far less endorse all the things that happened under his watch - but you know, shit happens when you start trying to fundamentally question & uplift the human consciousness beyond the boundaries of convention, so I'm not gonna throw stones. Think for yourself if you want to dare to try to.

[edit - June: I've lent this book to a colleague of mine who's into spiritual mysticism and all that after we had a conversation about the documentary. He's still very skeptical which is totally fair enough - they did have those pink police people...]

Grace Beats Karma

This book is a collection of letters written from prison* by Neal Cassady, primarily to his estranged wife, with excerpt ripoffs at the footers of each letter to be read to their kids; but also to his godfather who was in the Catholic clergy. We're only getting Neal's letters here, not the responses - if you need a reminder who he was, N.C. was a close friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, being immortalized by both as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and in various poetic referentialisms; little of Cassady's poetic writings survive in the world of Actual Publishing, but his impact as a personality is pivotally central to the whole generation of avant garde wordsmithery that followed in his wake.

   We forget too easily how deeply religious the Beat core founders were: Cassady and Kerouac devout catholics, Ginsberg a reformist Jew - as such, a considerable bulk of these letters is Neal talking on and around the history and understandings of his faith, trying to memorize the whole list of all the Popes** there's ever been while doing daily exercises in his cell and committing longer and longer passages of Scripture to memory.

   Ultimately it boils down to his inner wrestling with the transcendental realisations of dharma that he and his fellow poet-beats had 'discovered'*** the dharmic truths of Eastern religions, and were trying, through their business of poetry, to syncretize or harmonize these insights with Western Christendom; ultimately a task they were halfway successful in, but Neal paid for it with his life, being imprisoned by dint of his own trust in American libertarian amenities and losing his family soon after. These letters are not tragic - nor are they entirely pleasant reading; you can see the boredoms and hypocrisies and mental gymnastics he puts himself through each time his wife writes back - and the tidbits he feeds as half-truths to the kids make this an actually interesting case study book for psychologists looking into the neuroses of the archetypal charismatic leader of folks. Well worth a read if you're interested in modern American cultural history, or the roots of all Cool Poetic stuff since WW2.

Since grace, in real Christian life - really does beat karma, I'm going to take the timely opportunity here in this post to talk briefly about my exit from my home church, which I'd already given some intimations towards here and here.
   So, my home church, The Crowded House, has been hemorrhaging members for some years - often under legitimate pretences of planting new churches elsewhere, but also because something was rotten in the local Danish crown, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the dams holding back the leak or leaks of refugee testimonies burst - it made big news - and I don't entirely know where to look to for spiritual leadership now, as it kind of feels like waking up to the fact that Acts 29, the meta-church body of which I was a part, is no different from the personality cult megachurches where book sales and speaking tours take precedence over pastoral care for all in the flock.
   Others have said far more than I would like to say here on the whole messed up scenario, so rather than testify myself (which I have done, to the formal enquiry) I'm just going to linkdump a few things. Some have seen it as fishy since Driscoll days; signs of unchristian leadership were noted and undealt with a full decade ago; from 2016 red lights began popping up more and more - this was the same year both of my parents left TCH, forcing me to stay and decide whether I trusted them or my Elders more for my longterm spiritual welfare; and now, with all that has come to light having come to light - we need to be having serious conversations about what ministry looks like in the 21st century, dealing in Hard and Certain terms with celebrity status and bullying.

* Some policemen gave him a lift home once and he, well-spiritedly and not knowing they were cops, paid them for fuel in form of two or three jazzy cigarettes.

** He lists them, including their dates of popehood, in an appendix. Another appendix is a letter from Neal's long-suffering wife to Allan Ginsberg - or is it the other way around? In any case, it adds a good bookend.

*** "Disco inferno" I was, somewhere on the internet, told translated from Latin as "to learn through the fires of suffering" - but Google Translate didn't let me get away with this, and only by playing around with its phrasing to "discos infer no" which renders "bring no dishes" - which is arguably a Zenlightened kind of roundabout means of saying what I meant anyway.

the Cloud of Unknowing

This book is the product of an unknown 14th-century Carthusian monk, probably from the Midlands or thereabouts. It deals in an incredibly holistic worldview developed from the mystical  theology of Saint Denis, and contains as well as the introductory essay on Denis's thinking, an epistle on the subject of prayer, and a longer note discussing privy counselling, which I'm just going to haphazardly compare to being medieval term for spiritual direction: the main chunk of the text though is the central work as given the main title.

   The "cloud" refers to the impenetrable fog of ineffability that human minds brush up against during the holy act of contemplating the supreme virtues of God above; only by God's grace over time and effort can we begin to even somewhat penetrate deeper into the fog, and doing so can be psychologically and spiritually ardous even for the most liturgy-hardened monk. The author strongly recommends not reading this work at all if you have no desire to embark upon the road to deeper and greater contemplation of God's nature and works; but I took this warning with a pinch of salt and took the plunge. I regret nothing, but I easily could have lost my mind had God not stepped in to save me from where my contemplative journey started taking me - that's what happens when you, as a well-intentioned Christian, track daemonic energies into your own "holy" mind palace on the bootheels of your ego. So beware, and be mindful, and read this book if you want the inner adventure of a lifetime - for reading this whole thing may irrevocably open your eyes to spiritual dynamics of life that it is very difficult, in my observation, to unsee.

Holy Habits

This book by Andrew Roberts is a wholesome, practical* unpacking of how the community of followers of the Way (as Christianity was originally known before its adherents got called Christians) went about daily life following the Way to Christ's glory, as we're given a remarkably attractive, counter-cultural and transformative picture of in the last verses of Acts chapter 2. Roberts begins by breaking down the nature of what Christian life is, in terms of individual and communal rhythms of discpleship, which entails a commitment to God and one another, through sacrifice and suffering, experiencing signs and wonders of God's love for all - deepened intentionally as all share in things, through the habits. There's a lot to unpack from these and even more that could be said about how we might think of ways to contextualize them for different situations, but broadly we get listed ten habits that signify healthy spiritual and social patterns of discipleship as we follow the Way: biblical teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, eating together, giving, service, gladness and generosity, prayer, worship, and making more disciples. It may seem immediately like these cross over each other quite a lot and they do - they're meant to in real practice too! I'm not sure this book in itself is particularly groundbreaking or insightful but taking the time to walk through these patterns as practiced in the earliest model of Christian church and thinking about ways to apply and inhabit them today is certainly a worthwhile task in any Christian setting and if your church feels like it's missing something in terms of the day-to-day rhythms of normal life, that these aren't naturally helping people draw closer to each other and God, then this book may be a good leaping-off point for further thought on that question. Roberts writes accessibly and concisely, with a strong grounding in both real examples and scripture - and ends on a prophetic note, challenging us not only to see the routine habits of church-as-we-know-it as unchangeable but to push imaginatively onwards in emulation of Christ and his disciples as pictured.

* So much so that in the several years following its publication, it has helped spawn a new range of missional church resources from BRF.

A Secret History of Christianity

This book by Mark Vernon is a fascinatingly erudite, mindblowingly holistically-applicable and thoroughly thought-provoking exploration of the work of Owen Barfield - probably the least well-known of the main Oxford literary threesome of the inklings, though the other two better known members of this club both cited him as of key inspiration early on in their artistic and intellectual careers.* In it, we're taken on an invigorating mystical romp across the history of an element absolutely central to the metaphysical efficacy of this predominant world religion: that all good, true and proper parts of one's life have their root and essence in the shared life of God - something as bafflingly simple as endlessly complex, a perennial truism that lies at the heart-core of all religions, if not in doctrine then I believe in pragmatic reality; yet it's a notion the sincere realisation of doesn't seem to have been very far up the pastoral or otherwise priority lists of most Christian leaders across the history of the Church and its faith.

   Barfield's work is incredibly potent, drawing on language, psychology, social and historical and cultural considerations, philosophy and poetry in its purest sense - Vernon re-examines the person and teachings of Christ through the lens of Barfield's analysis of said mystical truth; and the theological and practical out-worked upshots herein are massive. World-shaking. The raw powers of inner reflectivity and the human imagination, when enthralled to True Goodness & Beauty, as given in the gospels, is incredible - but to see the scope of such raging paradoxes in their fullness one must accept the mystical element for what it is: once discovered and thusly inhabited, it is not something, I don't think, one can easily then just step back from, if at all, as it is of a profundity, breadth, joy, seriousness, playfulness, creativity and noisy silence that to enter the psychospiritual headspace, the lived consciousness talked about by Christ and Barfield and Vernon, utterly transforms everything about who you think you are and how you think you can be in the world. Which shouldn't sound like much of a surprise, as this is the core promise of Christianity as a faith: but I hope it doesn't sound like a callous barb to say that my gradual apprehension of my lived experience of this fact, the secret hiding in plain sight in Christ's apostolic succession, has been far more like the 'second birth' of a transformative, actual conversion than the course of personally walking with God that led to my being baptised as a pre-teen. Can you become a Christian twice? I'm not even sure the answer to that matters. I've been very lucky to have grown up with such exposure to the faith, but in all the honesty of my heart and mind - I feel luckier to have meandered to the extents I have on that walk so that Jesus found me all the more truly and powerfully somewhere on the border-lands.

   I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in consciousness and the human experience, regardless of what credence you may or may not lend to the Christian faith. Vernon's writing is accessible, entertaining and illuminating, and while readers who come at this book from within a church may find it opens up some strange wondrous new doors, it may also be for you very hard going because the perspective of gospel reality in here is so wild: and for that reason I think readers who remain skeptical of most organized forms of Christian community and faith will find this a refreshingly original, and starkly eye-opening take on the whole matter. I'm going to add some of Owen Barfield's stuff onto my reading pile, then probably read this again relatively soon...

* These being of course J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - and it shows.

the Inner Voice of Love

This book by Henri J. M. Nouwen was another raw example of God throwing unexpected reading recommendations at me which were precisely what I needed to read. Looking for another book by Nouwen on discernment, I stumbled across this, and realizing it was a journal he'd kept in the depths of a six-month spiral-dive into depression and only allowed to be published eight years later after realizing his insights gained from the period spent in darkness helped mould much of the spiritual core in his later influential works, decided it was the best place for me (who had not been as far-gone as Henri when writing this but in a pretty grim place most of the past year or three) to get an introduction to the man. "I moved from anguish to freedom, from depression to peace, from despair to hope... All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love", he writes on the blurb, and this struck a chord with me on the ways God had already intervened and developed my relationship with him in the danknesses of the period I hope to be starting to emerge from. A deep thinker and profoundly god-hearted feeler here wrestling his way through one of those curveballs our brains can sometimes be wont to throw us; certainly worth a read, especially for Christian readers who struggle with depression, or want better to support others who do.

Tao Te Ching

This book* is a collection of eighty-one short poem-chapters about life, the universe, and everything. Purportedly written by Lao-Tzu, who himself may or may not have been a real dude (although if he was real he was definitely a dude), it is an extremely ancient text and forms the basis of the philosophy-religion known as Taoism, which was of immensely influential stature in the development of much Chinese culture and thought.

   This is the first time any of the books I've reviewed on here has actually been any core religious texts, and I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it clearly hasn't stopped my try to write some kind of thunk. Maybe not? So much could be said that would be pointless in this case. You should read this whole book and maybe meditate for five minutes after each chapter - they're only very short. You could read the whole thing in an hour. But you might never understand what it was talking about unless you are already open to the Tao; that is the essentially mysterious ridiculousness of what I am currently doing, an endeavor to "explain" what this book is "about"...

   Let me just say this: having read and pondered this book,** I do no longer in full or clear conscience think I can consider myself to be, in the religious sense, *only* Christian, but that I must be at least somewhat a Taoist also, and further that if any readers of this are confused or enraged by this heretical presupposition - I would suggest it is because your mental faculties are too familiar with the ways of errant human civilization above the Tao which is the eternal Way of Nature, under and above all, compatible with and containing of all, the fundamental explanation and essence of what is***: how do I know? Like this!

* That link leads to a website which supplies seven different translations of the whole text - although the one I read was Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo's translation. Given the nature of ancient Chinese's linguistic differences to English, and the consistent levels of ambiguity present in the poetic-philosophic text itself, the perfect translation has been elusive, even though this little book is the world's second-most-translated text in history after the Bible.

** I must admit also that initially when I started reading this I found its sheer evasiveness offputting, and ran away to get a beginner's introduction to the underlying philosophy in the manner of examples with A. A. Milne characters, and frankly I'm glad I did, it really helped, and I was able to approach this text with a deeper appreciation of the gists which underlied and animated the nuanced flow of the book itself.

*** If you're "so Christian" that Lao Tzu and Winnie the Pooh can't convince you, then how about C. S. Lewis?

the Lotus and the Cross

This book is an imagined conversation, by Ravi Zacharias, between Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha - without wanting to deride its author too much, I think anyone will easily be able to instantly recognize that to faithfully and authentic-seemingly construct such a conversation would be an immensely delicate task of anyone's imagination, even without "taking a side" - which Zacharias does, for the Christian camp. That said it is not a dogma-heavy dismantling of Buddhism - or at least not as much as it might well have been if, say, certain other evangelical thought-leaders had written it - and while I think Zacharias's ultimate finished work in this book is a relatively generous, nuanced and thoughtful one, I do not believe he truly grasps the nature of Enlightenment as Buddha taught it, as to my own hunching there would be substantively more fruitful overlap between the thinking and praxis of the two were they to actually have met and talked; it concludes not with an intellectually-humble Kingdom-seeking consideration of possible both-ands, but Zacharias putting the nails into the "Buddha wrong, Jesus right" signpost - which is fair enough given its authorial purpose, but all things considered I think is a very ideologically blinkered way of dealing with both camps - insofar as one wishes them to actually come to respectfully and honestly understand one another, which is presumably sort of the point of writing a book like this.

Another thing, that has virtually nothing to do with this book but which I'm going to talk about on here because I need to process my thoughts on it and this blog has always sufficed as a place to process similar thoughts and this post seems to be a poetically apt place for the discourse I need to shart.
   I've left my church.
   This was an incredibly difficult decision, as I've been going there since the age of eight - in 2002, when the church itself was also young; I was baptised there, and pretty much all of my significant discipling relationships up until my joining Church Army's Research Team have been through it. My reasons for choosing to leave are many, complex, and deeply difficult to talk about - but I've been dithering over whether to go, and then when to go, and then how to tell my elders that I was going - for probably several years by now. But as you'll know if you read the recap post for 2018; my spiritual development has been accelerating a great deal and is rather unpredictable as of late - part of this has been through the nature of my work itself, part through ongoing exposure to a greater diversity of Christian expressions - as I've said in previous posts I've joined the Anglican Mission Community of which my work is a part - and even found myself visiting quiet corners of Christendom that I two years ago never would've dreamed myself to be seen in; and underneath or alongside all of this, is another aspect of my changing identity that has felt all-but-impossible to raise in TCH - even though if I'm being honest with myself looking back I should have heard the warning klaxons in my own heart years ago. So yeh, and yep I'm writing this in summer 2020, as this whole mess was probably the main bulk of reasons why I developed such an awful blog backlog, because my mind-heart was just not in a place where I could easily reflect on anything relevant to the posts I needed to write because it was all too fresh, too harsh, too painful and sad: but - I can't actually remember exactly when it went down, but some time during May or June of 2019, already having had a thoroughly unhelpful conversation with my elders about the fact that I'd joined the Church Army Mission Community and so I couldn't in good conscience 'sign up' to the formal TCH membership, as this denies anyone who does so from being part of any other Church communities - I came out as the gender non-binary problem-child that I am to my head elder and told him up front that I knew, Acts 29's position on gender-stuff being as it was, that to remain even a non-member but attender in the church I'd grown up in would entail the constant expectation from them as my pastors that I would someday repent of my personal identity - and this was not a situation I felt was healthy, or thus acceptable, so I'm leaving, sorry, please... thank you.
   I'm not writing this to make any kind of victorious or vindictive point. I'm fucking heartbroken.
   I just need some place to put this whole story down, as none of my brothers and sisters from TCH are likely to want to hear it, and few if any of my closest friends outside of church life would be able to grasp the emotional point of it, and the only other people I could talk to about it would have been in the office from which I've just been fired, or else my parents, who left the same church several years ago, but for very different reasons, and I'm not 'out' to them yet and I have no idea what they'd think. Anyway, it's all so close to the bone, that even now [as time of writing being summer 2020 I've had some time to process all this but it's still raw as heck], when I am 'out' to my parents, they just don't seem to give much of a shit and I'm not really sure what they think of what I told them of my actual triggering reason for leaving the same church. But - what's in the past is in the past. Jesus is good, and God's great grace is sufficient for all. Even genderqueer Quaker shitshows like me.

the Universal Christ

This book by ecumenical thought-leader Richard Rohr is an astounding treasure. It dives into the wholesale glorious mysteries of the biblical gospel, reminding us of the meaning of 'Christ', the freedom of forgiveness, the reality that Creation was God's testimony to us of heavenly truth long before scripture was written, the nature of spirit and incarnation, the sheer uncontainable universality of grace and peace and love...

   I don't have anything particuarly clever to say in reflection on this book. It simply pulled off the boots of my own Christian faith, shook them upside-down to dislodge a few large lumpy pebbles of English-evangelical intellectual cowardice and tribal complacency, then gently eased them back onto my feet as a liberating send-off back to the Jesus I had always known but now saw afresh. It is written accessibly enough for non-theologians, even non-Christians, and has a moral sensibility and wholesome common-good heartiness that I defy you to not find beautiful, challenging, and totally eternally counter-cultural: this is not Rohr's ideas unfolding themself but the very basics in implication of the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. A dazzling pragmatic inclusive truth, that has so long since been contained and constrained by overthinking underliving Christian commentary, the stultification of which Rohr here does a supremely excellent work in decolonizing Christ-consciousness from, yet never descending into partisan critique.

   I am giving this book to my mother and buying another copy to lend out.

A Call for Revolution

This book is a short, impassioned and timely reflection from His Holiness the Dalai Lama - as the title suggests, calling for a global insurgency - albeit one of empathy, of deep love for all beings and our shared world, for compassion, forgiveness, listening, breaking down the walls of the mental prisons we have traumatized ourselves into inhabiting across our history and creating spaces for new, urgent possibilities. It is a call I very much endorse.

Encounters on the Edge: A Short Intermission

This booklet (online as pdf here) by George Lings (see also) is a practical, example-rich, missionally-minded consideration of how churches can engage with the arts better in a variety of ways, be that to reach new people, develop relations or deepen faith journeys among older ones, or whatever - it takes a much broader tack than just Messy Church, and for anyone in church leadership who'd like to think of ways of bringing creativity into your ecclesial life (which, trust me, is worth doing but bloody difficult oftentimes) I'd recommend checking out this as it's a fab little primer.

Quakers: Advices & queries

This booklet (available as text online) comprises the introductory guidelines to what it means to be a Quaker or participate in the community, worship or otherwise life/activity of the Religious Society of Friends - 42 short reflections laying out the roots, gists, and thrusts of Quakerism generally - if you can even call it an ism, which I'm growingly sure you can't, not accurately at any rate. I'm still very new to & relatively suspicious of this whole Quaker thing [wQt], and while this short book by no means answered any let alone all my questions it laid out a fruitful groundwork of understanding by which I can now approach the wQt. If you don't know much about the wQt - whether you are irreligious, or a Christian, or whatever - I'd be interested to hearing people's first (or current etc) broad impressions of it in the comments, as I'm still very much an explorer here myself. But as with all things I'd hasten to add a warning that you can't dismiss something out of hand if you don't know what it is from a nuanced, unbiased perspective; and I've not found it very easy so far to get these kinds of views from other Christians about the wQt.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How Faith Changes

This book* by Ruth Perrin is an absolute marvel of qualitative research in the complicated theological and cultural context that is millennials. She interviewed 47 young people from across 23 Protestant denominations, all living in Newcastle upon Tyne, the Tees Valley or Northumberland, and who had all been actively-affirming Christians in their early 20's - now aged 29-37, she explores a rich and deep and thoroughly challenging set of ways in which their faith has been knocked, changed, reformed, dropped, and so on. I've probably read this more like two or three times because it spoke so deftly into the particular kinds of things I've seen young Christians wrestle with (often, as she discusses, largely without helpful support from church families, for a number of reasons) and the fallouts of these issues; though not wishing to simply offload an attempt at a personal summary of her whole arguments and methodologies (fascinating though these are), particularly because she has a fuller book about the same thing coming out soon and I'd rather discuss it in detail then (as I will definitely be getting a copy when it comes out in January). Not much point making a recommendation to you, dear audience, when there is very little chance you would be able to acquire a copy of this particular book either - but it was a highly informative and illuminating exploration of the field and would probably surprise most readers as to the fluidity of religious faith and some of the dynamics underlying this.

* No link on this one, sorry! I know it's against my own rules but hey, it was a limited run exclusively shipped to church research folks and I can't find a page for or about it online anywhere. Check out her blog Discipleship Research though. And consider pre-ordering her next wider-audience book which will probably build on a lot of the research discussed in this.