Book Reviews

  ‘The Via Dolorosa … is crossed by Jewish Orthodox hurrying down to prayer at the Western Wall, and at the same time it witnesses Muslim men kneeling on their mats at the time of prayer in their shops. It passes a place for the rehabilitation of blind refugees and others with disabilities. Along its route today are found soldiers, beggars, pilgrims, and tourists; street sellers, laughing children, and disabled elderly. This river of prayer and passion flows in the broken heart of the city, as a potential source of healing and forgiveness’. In such words Andrew Mayes takes us to the Jerusalem he is familiar with, its prayer and passion, opening up testimonies across faiths using the city gates as a device to frame a book on transformative spirituality. It works at different levels, guide book of Jerusalem, chronicle of salvation history, study of interfaith relations and celebration of missionary spirituality.  Each chapter links to a gate of Jerusalem - Golden, Southern, Zion...

  UN statistics inform us of 80 million displaced people worldwide in 2019. The problems surrounding such a flood of refugees are depicted daily on our media. It is an overwhelming phenomenon and hard to grasp with all the associated politics. ‘The Beekeeper of Aleppo’ is a fictional story based on well known facts about the tumult in Syria which succeeds in putting faces on what it is to be a 21st century refugee from a war zone. The author Christy Lefteri, a lecturer in creative writing at Brunel University, is the daughter of Cypriot refugees and her book was inspired through her work as a volunteer at a Unicef supported refugee centre in Athens. Beekeeper Nuri and his artist wife Afra live in Aleppo. Their peaceful life in that beautiful city is destroyed in the Syrian conflict, an unspeakable loss which includes that of a family member and for Afra, now blind, her sight. The book chronicles the couple’s flight to the UK via Turkey and Greece. Nuri’s cousin and fellow beekeeper...