Book Reviews

‘Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside’ wrote GK Chesterton, big picture Christian of the last century. Where are the big picture Christians of today with the ear not just of the church but the world? Franciscan monk Richard Rohr is one of them though on the fringe on account of his occasional sparring with church authority. Like Merton he writes with a depth that appeals beyond religion blessing unhappy relativists and materialists as well as over cerebral believers. ‘The Universal Christ’ is his magnum opus and it thrills with the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Rohr builds like Teilhard de Chardin from the first chapters of John, Ephesians, Colossians and Hebrews which point to the cosmic pre-existent Christ, to how the incarnation is anticipated at creation and how love holds everything together. ‘Christ is both the Divine Radiance at the Beginning Big Bang and the Divine Allure drawing us into a positive future. We are thus book...

On a visit to the local monastery for spiritual direction I was struck by the number of monks reading this book and raised humorously the question ‘how are you getting on with Holy Living’? My own reading had preceded theirs and this review provides my answer! That so many involved in religious life and spiritual direction look to Rowan Williams as an authority is a tribute to the breadth and depth of his engagement with the Christian tradition even if the density of his thought can be overpowering. Though dense he is challenging, full of spiritual wisdom and can make one sentence summaries of immense realms. I liked these sentences on church controversy, globalisation, Sunday trading and sex: ‘We have little incentive to be open with each other if we live in an ecclesial environment where political conflict and various kinds of grievance are the dominant currency… Structures and landscapes that proclaim the powerlessness of individuals and of small-scale societies to exercise a...