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.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

This debut novel by Gail Honeyman is a rarity for me; A book read Because it was Popular in the Contemporary shopshelves.* It's a weird book and I loved it to bits. Dealing with the heavy topics of mental health, childhood trauma, abusive relationships and unrealistic expectations born of self-coddling, it's actually much more fun that I've just made it sound (although in the places where it deals with these more head on, boy is it stomachumping). Our eponymous narrator's life is outrageously sad, yet what's harder to bear is just how totally Normal & Fine she maintains to be: her perspective is unlike anything I've read in first-person fiction and made me feel so many strange mixes of sorrowful & amused; the closest description I can readily think of is imagine Mark Corrigan with a (darker**) Dickensian backstory. The cast of other characters are remarkably well-drawn from this odd vantage point and overall it makes for an incredibly easy page-turner full of enough to prompt a shockingly healthy blend of sadness & hilarity.

* I'm not a strict hipster honest I've just got a shitload of exigent reading to do that is typically older existent published material & whose recommendation comes not from 'No. Copies Sold' but from either-both my own esoteric curiosities and/or the book's historical influence.

** Cards on the table, I'm not too sure how dark your average Dickensian backstory is, I've never read any of his work past a few pages, cos they're too old & too popular #LOL

Scarface Claw

This book by Lynley Dodd hits all the right notes one would expect from a children's book about an unfriendly cat. He prowls around, hisses, scratches, intimidates dogs and a few other cats, then gets terrified at the end, which is always fun. Spoiler alert I suppose? As with the whole series by this author/illustrator a great go-to for young readers.

Jesus: Ph.D. Psychologist

This book by Tom Bruno was a hard and highly rewarding read. Regular followers of this blog may know my mental health isn't always great and neither is my faith, so reading a book that basically lays out my personal Lord and Saviour as being the perfect archetype of psychological wellbeing was a bit too close to like conducting rather aggressively on-the-nose theological therapy on myself. Needless to say I made lots of notes, had lots of arguments with God, prayed a lot, cried a lot, and came out the other side somewhat less lost in my own head and somewhere closer to stability of thought and feeling rooted in a more settled personal effort to offer my life to Christ each day, each moment. Which, my goodness, I probably can't credit this book alone as having done because lots of other shit has been kicking off in my life during the span of reading this, and I've been reading lots of other stuff too, but I may as well give credit where credit's due.

   Bruno writes clearly, using actual psychology alongside stories of Jesus' life and teaching to illuminate the wholesome principles laid out in each chapter - which explore how Jesus (despite being a mere carpenter from a backwater town under Roman occupation 2000 years ago) may be deserving of an honorary doctorate in psychotherapy for the following pointers:

• Take the inward journey
• Focus
• It is up to us
• Have purpose in life
• Keep the inner child alive
• Work through your fears
• Know yourself
• Ask for what you want
• Stay in touch with your feelings
• Don't worry
• Keep your heart pure
• Learn how to transcend the valleys
• Stop blaming others
• Work a program
• Retain a dynamic view of life
• Use your gifts wisely
• Manage your anger
• Retreat before you charge
• Take control of your life
• Believe that you can change your life
• Stop searching for happiness
• Be thankful
• Plant
• Love may be difficult
• Empower people (especially women)
• Love is the priority
• Speak as a man to men
• Forgiveness must be a part of your life
• Accept people where they are, and challenge them
• Seek truth and freedom
• Keep in contact with the highest power
• Know how to listen
• Stop chasing what you can't keep
• Loosen up and laugh
• No quick-fixes

   After these digestible chapter-insights, there's a final chapter exploring the nature of discipleship on the sinner's human psyche and how liberating it can be to love, be loved by and imitate Jesus Christ, who acts as the catalyst for all growth into mental and spiritual health. There's an appendix helping programmatize this for a flexible range of personal struggles too, though I haven't used this. It looks similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous use though so it's probably got a strong track-record.

   Overall, the book is a treasure trove of practical insight into how being better attuned to, and in control of, one's own behaviour and reactions, in the flux of feelings and ideas and relationships and an ever-changing sinful world, can help us not only draw nearer to God but achieve deeper and sturdier mental wellbeing. Each chapter has a few really helpful reflection questions at the end of it too, so you can work your shit out in real time as you read through. And no, you can't borrow my copy, it's full of far too much of exactly this.

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.

The Truth

This book is the twenty-fifth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and concurrently a corker. It follows an ambitious-yet-directionless young black-sheep-of-nobleman's-family William de Worde, who goes on to tap with outrageously chaotic degrees of success, failure, and every surreal inbetween, the hitherto-previously-unmet need of Ankh-Morpork for a newspaper. It's laugh-out-loud-funny in more places than there are pages, with a wacky supporting cast and textbook-Pratchett seamless plotting & dialogue; and if the title theme didn't give it away also offers an enduringly prophetic fable about Truth, truth, profit margins and populism... A fantasy comedy for our times, indeed.

There's a Hair in my Dirt!

This book, written and illustrated by the inimitable The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, is another of the old kids' books left at my parents' house that I've binge-read out of pure unfettered nostalgia, and of the three so far thusly describable it is by far the best on a number of levels.*

   It features a family of anthropomorphized earthworms, the child of whom promptly sets off the story by making its eponymous complaint. The father worm responds by telling him a fable about the true nature of nature, in which animals don't always understand what other animals are doing, trying to do, or even for, and the anarchic cycles of ecology roll ever onwards, illustrated through myriad amusing examples with rich visual humour (the main character of this story is a nature-loving maiden called Harriet, whose final attempt to save a mouse from a snake results in her [SPOILER ALERT] getting a virus from the mouse, dying, and rotting, hence the hair in the dirt). The young worm finishes his reception of the tale with an emboldened sense of a worm's place in the world, then finishes his dinner.

   Very very very funny, surprisingly educational, and you can spend longer looking for all the detail-jokes in the drawings than it would take you to read the text. Certainly a book to crack out for kids who say they like nature, but aren't nearly morbid enough in their worldview yet to display that they properly understand its workings.

* Larson being a favourite humourist of the scientific community, this even features a celebratory foreword from esteemed ecologist Edward O. Wilson, which must be a first for a kids' book.

Wonderful Earth!

This book by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen* follows almost exactly the same gist as this one, and I read it for basically the same reason. However - it is notably better in three main ways:

1. The illustrations are far richer and funnier (and some of them even pop out, fold or move, which is just well exciting for young readers),
2. Instead of just saying "and God made the animals etc" it goes into a great deal of fun and idiosyncratic detail about the sheer crazy variety of these animals,
3. The final two pages lead into a reflection on humanity's created role as the stewards of God's Earth, and how badly we've fucked this up through rapacious industry.

So yeh, on an indoctrinating-children-into-religious-metaphysics level, I'd recommend this one more than most comparable products because it will turn kids into depressed nature-loving radicals like me. Maybe. Who can say?

* The same bestselling duo behind Percy the Park-keeper and Kipper respectively, for all you late-20th-century British children's books aficionados.

Anarch

This book, the fifteenth Gaunt's Ghosts novel by Dan Abnett, is about as heart-stopping and thrilling a conclusion to a series as I can remember ever reading. While the Big Twists were dampened slightly by my own guessing them a-book-and-a-half prior and halfway through respectively,* the combination of slow-burn plot and punchy characterful action is masterfully written as is the gritgore horror of the Big Bad Guys - and [PARTIAL MAYBE SPOILER ALERT] I'm glad to say my favourite scout-sergeant got probably the single coolest fething showdown** I've seen on the plasma-screen cinema that is my imagination. Hats off. And while it would feel like a natural end to the series, who knows?

* Not to say most readers would. I'm just overly paranoid about what Dan tends to do with his characters, and to be honest I've probably got a bit of warp-taint in me, which helps on this particular front of expecting the brutally ridiculous.

** If not coolest moments outright, but that's just daily porridge for Oan.

the Gruffalo

This book, by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler (a thoroughly-competent team of childrens' book production if ever there was one), you've probably already heard of as a modern classic. It follows a mouse* through the forest as he debates with various animals why they shouldn't eat him because he's friends with a scary monster (who the mouse proceeds to seemingly invent over the story's course), who then meets said monster - and it all goes rather well for them both. Rhyming couplet text, exceedingly juicy illustrations and the final twist all work in tandem to make this probably the most enduring kids' book of its decade. You don't need my recommendation, this would be by default a great lump for anyone under the age of 7 or so.

* In the more recent film adaptation played by Martin Freeman, who I can only say is perfect for this role in an otherwise also-well-cast-and-producedly excellent film version

The World that God Made

This book, by Jan Godfrey and illustrated by Peter Adderley, is essentially a child-friendly paraphrase of Genesis chapter 1 (albeit with better or at least more colourful pictures than most Bibles). I've recently moved back into my family home and was surprised to see it's still here, and read it in two minutes out of pure nostalgia. It's alright I guess, for its target audience, and if compared to similar books long-sat upon the same stretch of shelf it sticks to the gist without trying too hard to indoctrinate small children into anti-science views, so I can't really decry it too much.

The Warmaster

This book, the fourteenth of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels by Dan Abnett,* more than lived up to the high-bar expectations set by its predecessors. Dark and grim as are all stories told in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the characters are as well-fleshed-out as ever and the stakes for our beloved Tanith First regiment have seldom been higher - Chaos-worshippers and Imperial stalwarts alike screwing together a tightly-driven plot that is as deft as it is unpredictable. My one gripe is that it ends on a gigantic cliffhanger which by dint of my now having finished this one compels me tomorrow to visit my local Games Workshop to get a copy of the next instalment.

* A writer who has never failed to entertain me. I will tell this tangential story here cos I may as well own it (even though in past years it has been a fact I've tried not particularly hard to share with friends or acquaintances); when I was a teenager I loved this series of novels to such an extent that when faced with the medically-informed possibility of death and offered something along the lines of Make A Wish Before You Pop It my chosen dream-fulfilment was to attend Games Day, meeting there not only the creative teams behind my much-loved armies (orks & tyranids, go hard or go back to Terra) but also had lunch with Dan and was privileged to talk at length with him about the writers' life, inspiration, and just how damn good of a universe to write in/about 40k is. He was incredibly kind & accommodating to this morbid nerdy adolescent - and though I didn't realise it directly at the time, inspired me lots to simply write. So if you're reading this, Warmaster - thanks, and expect a solid mention in the acknowledgements if I ever get my own novel finished.

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 Tao of Pooh & the Te of Piglet

This book (or rather pair of books, their having originally been published separately but are nowadays generally distributed as a two-in-one compendium, just like their  founding inspirational scriptures of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), by Benjamin Hoff, is a delightfully accessible and remarkably profound introduction to the general kind of shape and texture and colour of the principles of Taoism.

   Replete with extracts from A. A. Milne's beloved original classics (as well as illustrations from these) as well as from the writings of Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Zhu, and a number of other ancient Chinese sages, Hoff adroitly demonstrates how Pooh lives in harmony with the Tao of the Hundred-Acre-Wood and its various inhabitants in ways that we could learn a great deal from in our crowded rushed modern world; while Piglet's very smallness and oft-fearful-but-never-insincere eagerness to help or reassure insofar as he can encapsulates much of the Taoist virtuosity of Te... all this in ways I would be doing both the philosophy and Hoff's wonderful children's-fictional exposition of it a grand injustice to try to give a pat summary of. But I must say it was quite wonderful to have characters like Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, Tigger and Roo, in their deceptive charming simplicity, be shown to quite perfectly embody the positive or negative or fluid aspects of un-Taoist living or un-Tefull being that pervade and restrict so much of the natural mystery of living and being, particularly in our over-intellectualized over-systematized technological mess of what we consider passes for contemporary civilisation.

   Pardon my rant. I kind of gonzo'd this post in an attempt to avoid falling into the very same kind of Heffalump trap that I'm trying to gently warn about, and which Hoff, through Christopher Robin's assortment of imaginary friends and various evasive apothegmic koans or jokey anecdotes about Confucius, will kindly and accurately help you to see wherever they may pop up in the footsteps in the snow you're following round and round the copse. Anyway, this is a fantastic entertaining enlightening book and probably the best introduction to Taoism I could, in my inexperience, recommend to a Western reader.

"Safe Metamorphosis!!"

This book is the first full poetry collection from Otis Mensah, himself Sheffield's esteemed Poet Laureate and an incomparable jazz-rapper. His words (which I'll get to) are bolstered with an enigmatic series of illustrations by George William Stewart, Luke Featherstone, and Miroslav Kiss.

   Okay - the title, what's that about? Imagine there's a spacestation, and everyone on it has never left it but knows they need to - how terrifying! So, once the moments inevitably come for people to be shuttled onto their capsules and shot out into the inky void, a few cheery veterans of this process, who know the pains and processes of going from embryo to Full Moth or Whatever - shout sarcastically as these pods fly past "[title]!" Which is a weird image but a comforting one when you know who's shouting it and why, and Mensah's book fulfils that role perfectly.

   The poems in here are profound meditations on identity, change, anxiety, technology, trust, creativity, race, class, loss, love, and so much more. A few of them genuinely have prompted more genuine philosophical questing in myself than many full books of "Actual Philosophy", and do so with a readableness and perspicuity that gave me pang after pang of poet envy** for the skill with which he spins vivid metaphors off their own axes again and again in truly an alchemical application of uncluttered language. Just rereading that sentence I am not in the slightest shocked that I envied this skill [that of uncluttrdness] LOL.

   Poems to be read aloud - for sure, as each quivers to their brims with audible zigzags wordplay and little resonances that bring even more life from the verses penned. Though if you want to hear them in full fat you'd do no better than to see this brilliant artist*** live. His book, like mine and Raluca's, was initially a self-publication, so unless we're in a fortunate future where this has been picked up for mass-distribution, you may struggle to get you hands on a copy, in which case I can only apologize for now for getting you all excited about how bloody good this collection is.

* Check out his hiphop on soundcloud - he's a bona-fide lyrical genius, and his backdrop beats are sick to boot. Also to make a completely unnecessary claim-to-fame I feature very briefly in one of his music videos, and do somewhat regret the mustard cardigan as it may have been too loud for the surrounding colour scheme. Liam, if you're reading this, sorry for over-yellowing the aesthetic.

** Difficult to pick an overall fave - but 'Speak Light into the Dark', the untitled one [signed no name], and 'No-one Here Hears Me' are just unfetteredly incredible & spoke to me with so much poignancy that I got paranoid I was misreading certain lines because it seemed too close to certain trains of thought I'd been trying not to own.

*** And an absolutely lovely man, I'm not name-dropping I genuinely know him through Sheffield poet life stuff