Book Reviews

  Pope Francis  A Gift of Joy and Hope Translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky Hodder & Stoughton 2022 £9.99 eBook ISBN 978 1 399 80283 3 209pp 'This is Christian hope: the certainty of walking towards something that exists, not something I hope might be there.' So writes Pope Francis who like his patron Saint Francis shares the gospel in succinct phrases when necessary. The presence and joy of God are offensive to many but to Christians this certainty isn’t offensive but definitive. As definitive as the fact Christ is alive and wants us alive, rising from negativity into undefeatable joy. ‘Since Christ has risen and leads us into the afterlife, faith is also a light from the future, illuminating vast horizons before us, taking us beyond our isolated individual selves and towards the expanse of communion. We come to see that faith does not dwell in shadow and gloom; it is a light for our darkness. Dante, in The Divine Comedy, after professing his faith to St Peter, ...

  ‘In a satirical political sketch, one of the leading politicians says words to the effect of, ‘If you feel offended by my accusing you of fraud and treason, then I am sorry.’ A genuine apology would be: ‘I accused you of fraud and treason, I was wrong. Please forgive me.’ Yet the ‘non-apology apology’ is the most frequently used. Anything that begins with ‘if’ and puts the blame for being offended on the victim is a non-apology. Anything that leaves the more vulnerable trapped into being manipulated towards forgiveness is not an apology’. This is a timely and clear illustration on asking forgiveness in Archbishop Welby’s magnum opus ‘The Power of Reconciliation’ published in advance of this year’s Lambeth Conference. Another topical feature is the Virgin and Child on its inside page sketched in the frozen terror of Stalingrad, resonant of Russia’s anguish in World War Two. The book went to print just before the invasion of Ukraine so its celebration of a Russian aspect of peacema...

  A hundred years ago in January 2022 Revd Leslie Mannering of St Matthew’s Brixton circulated his first monthly leaflet of bible readings with commentaries ‘for the purpose of deepening the life of Prayer, Bible-reading and Holy Communion in each one of us’. So began what became the world-wide movement we know as BRF, the Bible Reading Fellowship. The Centenary is being launched with publication of 365 bible reflections written by different contributors including myself geared to energise searching of scripture and submission of lives to the Word of God. As Sally Welch writes, ‘we are not a people of a book… we are children of God… we follow a person, not a page; the Word, not words’. The genius of BRF is its steering away from both biblical literalism and renegotiation of scripture to fit in with contemporary thinking. ‘The BRF book of 365 Bible Reflections’ is a series of windows to be opened daily providing ‘light to our paths’ (Psalm 119:105). The variety of readings and contr...

‘Before we ever are the object of our own gaze, or the gaze of those around us, we are the objects of God’s gaze. God’s gaze is deeply loving, but it is also perfectly truthful. To know ourselves as God knows us is to know ourselves as deeply loved, but also to face up to our scars and sinfulness. God affirms us, but God also challenges us to discover and inhabit our identity differently. God sometimes challenges us to let go of things we thought were core to who we are, and sometimes to take on things we had not considered before. But those challenges are never an imposition on our true selves; they are always about being freed from the narrow confines of lives turned in on themselves in order to find our true flourishing with others, and pre-eminently with God’. Such words give a taster of a rich Christian document as it sets forth the transformative good news of Jesus and its relevance to identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage in a context where many are looking to the chur...

  ‘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...

Lockdown brought me a blessing through engaging with this second to last book of the late Fr Daniel O’Leary which had been awaiting my attention for a year. Reading the book became a timely blessing impacting my thinking and praying and hopefully my action. In a way there was nothing new in it, simply a reminder to see God in all things and all things in God. In another way it was full of newness, the perpetual newness of Jesus captured in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin as a bridge from Christianity towards the progress and evolution of the world. Yes, the book rattled my pride as orthodox Christian with calls for dismissing original sin, dualism in historic faith and over prioritising sexual ethics. Yet I felt compelled by its thesis of God’s invincible love being allied to the evolution of the world today. Daniel O’Leary has infectious magnanimity so this traditionalist was disarmed by his appeal, putting some issues on hold whilst reading it. Such putting on hold is aided by th...