Book Reviews
Book Review: ‘Looking for Lydia’ by Sally Mann
This is an inspiring book about the journey Sally and Dave Mann have experienced in the East End of London. The subtitle of the book is ‘encounters that shape the church’ and they explore these by focusing on some of the key figures we read about in Acts and the epistles.
Liberty, Equality, …Disintegration? A Conversation with the author of ‘Why Liberalism Failed’
What we call liberalism today is in fact a transformation from a classical and Christian definition and understanding of liberty to one where liberty is understood as capacity to live one’s life in the absence of external constraints, brackets the question of truth and goodness, and leaves it up to the individual to define the nature of one’s own good. This is profoundly different...
Book Review: Undomesticated Dissent by Curtis Freeman.
The theme of Freeman’s book is dissent and its critical place in both the formation and thriving of democracy. He focuses on three of the early pioneers of this dissent in 17th and 18th century British social life, that period of time when England was thrust into social upheaval...
‘Practices for the Refounding of God’s People.’ Part 1: Modernity’s Wager.
To engage the modern west with the gospel we need to understand that it has been shaped by ‘modernity’s wager’: the belief that life can be lived well without God. According to Alan Roxburgh and Martin Robinson in this conversation...
‘Practices for the Refounding of God’s People’: Part 2: Practices for Refounding.
The British and European church has benefitted from the arrival of Christian migrants from Africa and Asia, a ‘blessed reflex’ from the early days of mission. According to Alan Roxburgh the Canadian church has benefitted from the wisdom of First Nations indigenous peoples who have embodied an appreciation of the land...
Book review: Faithful Presence by David Fitch
This conversation between David Fitch and Alan Roxburgh revolves around David’s recent book Faithful Presence[1] and his life in a church plant near Chicago. David describes his book under three headings: The Presence of God at work in localities, discerned through Practices such as Eucharist, shared meals and reconciliation. We are located in Places where sometimes we will be gathered with other Christians and sometimes...
The End of Liberalism? What the Euro-tribal churches are missing.
The books mentioned propose that the modern, liberal Western imagination is at the root of our current crises and malaise. Liberalism isn’t something that needs to be fixed or adjusted; it is the problem. The challenge isn’t fixing but the construction of a fundamentally different imagination rooted in the Christian and Classic understandings of virtue and the Good. Liberalism is an ideology...
Books in conversation: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the book of Acts
It's a serendipitous experience to read books across different genres and make connections that stretch you. Two books by Edward Luce have done this for me recently: Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) and The Retreat of Western Liberalism (Little, Brown Book Group, 2017). These books articulate a concern about the crisis of Western democracy apparent in many books and articles. While reading these I was also reading C Kavin Rowe’s’ The World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (OUP, 2009) which made some connections which go beyond the familiar frameworks of the twentieth century.
Book review: ‘The Wages of Rebellion’ by Chris Hedges.
The Wages of Rebellion is shaped initially by an analysis of Western revolutionary theory from the 19th century forward. Revolutions, Hedges proposes, are not fermented by ideas promulgated by elites. They occur when intolerable gaps develop between ordinary people and the reigning narratives of the state, its economics and its elites.
Alan Roxburgh reviews this book and introduces a number of other books on a similar theme.
Book Review: ‘Between the World and Me’ by Ta-Nehisis Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a self-proclaimed atheist who rejects the Christian God, and yet his book, Between the World and Me, is what happens when God draws the curtains to unveil the evil of racism that prevails across the world. This book is a critical social commentary on life in the United States that should inform every conversation concerned with mission in places that live with racial and economic oppression.