Book Reviews

The important role of media in advocating our judgment upon people and policies goes without question. How we work round media to form right judgment on these under God is both a personal challenge and, where necessary, in the public domain, a legal one. Advocacy - standing by people and policies - is a fascinating topic of immense relevance to the health of society yet it’s legal side is rather closed to folk unschooled in law. This very readable book handed me by a friend in the legal profession opened my eyes to the heart of court proceedings. Sally Smith QC’s biography of the legend Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC tells the graphic tale of one who ‘saved more people from the hangman’s noose than any other known barrister’. Sally Smith deftly takes us back a century to times when our legal process was handled by an establishment lacking compassion and blatantly favouring the rich and powerful. Marshall Hall rose in that establishment but the vagaries of his life lent him empathy ...

‘I was appalled by the depth and profundity of Christian thinking, and by the cogency of the Gospel’ wrote a Christian convert going on to say what swayed him: ‘it was something about [a Christian community’s] quality of being which left me feeling like a thirsty man in the desert… a lovingness and peacefulness, a sense of shared and accepted purpose, a humbleness before facts which made me feel singularly small and lost’. This is one of several illustrations in Alan Wilkinson’s sermon collection that heartened me as a word picture of the power of lived out Christianity to draw folk in. Reflections for the Unfolding Year spans Advent to Christ the King Sundays with additional topics and distils spiritual wisdom over 50 years from a priest mainly based at Portsmouth Cathedral who served in my own Chichester Diocese as Principal of the Theological College. I say ‘distils’. The relentless liturgical cycle challenges priests to address Advent, Easter etc again and again.  Sometimes...

‘He vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race!’ So translates the choir screen monument epitaph adjacent to its graphic globe honouring gravity theorist Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in Westminster Abbey. Rob Iliffe’s Priest of Nature is a study of ‘the religious worlds of Isaac Newton’ based on documents recently made accessible that reveal the ‘utterly original but obsessively private religion’ of this dominant intellectual figure of his age. Newton was born in 1642, strikingly as the English Civil War started, with an ‘uncommon spirit of liberty’ which eventually came to possess him as a thinker and a Christian pushing at age old authority. His amazing capacity of thought bore fruit in his Principia securing him high postings at Cambridge, the Royal Mint and the Royal Society but his thinking also extended to Christ...