Faith After Doubt

Faith After Doubt

Brian McLaren

A longer book review on the way. This book has been really important for me. It may be equally helpful for others on similar journeys.

I came to faith through the ministry of a church youth group in suburban Birmingham in the early 1970s. I didn't know anything about the range of style within the Church of England at first. Soon I understood that it was a Conservative Evangelical church.

That youth group was run by a talented and tireless curate called Don. On the 'divisive' issues of the day he was not extremely conservative. He was a huge supporter of women's ministry and ordination, and forgiving on divorce and remarriage. That said I regularly heard sermons that promoted creationism over evolution.

Fast forward a few years and I'm married, have a son and am pursuing the possibility of ordination. That journey came as a surprise to me and is another story. I headed off to St John's College in Nottingham and a degree in theology.

I wasn't a great student but I was fascinated. Getting to grips with theological reading for the first time in my life I was also angry. Why had I been a member of churches for ten years and no one had so much as hinted at this sort of thing? The very idea that the Bible contained a range of material, not all of it history, started to help me make sense of things. Others who had the same experience struggled with their faith. But a reasonable summary of my years since then has been a desire to make sure people were not as uneducated as I. But how to do that?

As McLaren himself says, '...the better the job that colleges do in actually training their student to be responsible theologians, the more out of sync those future pastors will be with churches that hire them to maintain the status quo.'

It has not been a matter of asserting things that would start a fight. It has been a matter of patiently and gently suggesting things such as:

• Genesis 1-11 is not history
• In the Gospels some words are put on Jesus' lips by the writers
• Some biblical teaching is limited by the culture of its day
• Substitutionary atonement is a model, not the model

For the last 25 years Brian McLaren has been a companion on this journey, although we have never met. His trilogy of books about the sorts of things I have listed above, and his journey in conservative churches, were helpful. (1)

Since then, along the way, he has been true to his original aim of helping us to discover how a new kind of Christian leads to a new way of being church.

Which brings us to this - Faith after Doubt. It's sub-titled 'Why your beliefs stopped working and what to do about it'.

There have been many fine attempts over the years to categorise stages of faith. Fowlers six are the best known. All seem to suggest that the arrival at sage-like dotage just before your death bed is the ideal.

Here are McLaren's stages:

1. Simplicity

Epitomised by a desire to divide the world into yes or no, good or bad, in or out. Likes to belong to a church with clear black and white rules about ethics and doctrine. All that is required of a member is unquestioning loyalty.

Me 1971-76

2. Complexity

Here the question is 'How can I be successful?' Things are no longer known and knowable but learned and doable. Moving away from authority figures as soon as you discover they have flaws. Maybe start looking for a church community more like you. Exchange the joy of being right for the joy of being effective.

Many members of the faith community never get beyond this stage.

Me 1976 - 1996

3. Perplexity

Those who do not want to settle down in stages 1 or 2 often leave. For those who don't 'Come join a community of people who don't know what they believe any more but want to talk about it' is not an easy recruit. Plus the leaders have no answers or certainties. Many ministry students experience this in their first term of theological education. And having built something wonderful as we moved from stage 1 to stage 2 we find ourselves knocking it down again. Members of this group often have humility (I don't know the answer) and courage (Let's journey into the unknown together and see where it leads). Not moral relativism but challenging incomplete morality.

I got here quickly (hold the humility) and spent 1981-96 crossing over. I since have been here for about thirty years. The reason Faith After Doubt is so good is that it encouraged me to go on with the journey

Me 1981-2023

4. Harmony

Many members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) laugh at the slowness with which western Christians get to this point. It is the stage at which one sees love as the driving force steering us through 1-3. It is the point at which we accept, rather than reject, all the disparate bits and pieces of messy life which have got us here. The new music is of appreciation, empathy and wonder. McLaren adds love. No wonder being present in stage four can feel like being lost for words, or maybe lost in wonder, love and praise as the hymn puts it.(2)

I once got in a big dispute by arguing that all change comes from dissatisfaction. I stand by that although the discussion was passionate. I don't think I can persuade you to change your mind until you are dissatisfied with the status quo. And conversely I must value the doubt I developed about my stages 1-3 faith for without the doubt I wouldn't have reached here. Reached where? Well, reached the start of the journey, a journey most people never discover and few have the privilege of joining.

Me, now.

If you're ready, read this book.

(1) A New Kind of Christian (2001)
The Story We Find Ourselves In (2003)
The Last Word and the Word After That (2005)

(2) Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

How Westminster Works

In 1997 New Labour came to power. There was little freedom to start spending so they needed a big statement that would cost little. Throughout the 1990s the John Major government had used interest rates as a political tool. I made my first mortgage payment for several years on the day known as Black Wednesday in 1992 when interest rates briefly went up to 15%. New Labour, on about day three, gave the Bank of England the freedom to set interest rates independent of government. It changed public perception of politicians overnight and bought good will for their first two years in which spending was tight

I first encountered Ian Dunt's writing as a columnist in the ipaper. I was impressed by pithy articles that educated whilst questioning in areas of political life. It is proper journalism written in a style that never allowed the prose to interfere with the point.

The second Dunt is a rather sweary tweeter (now Xer) who gives full reign to his political anger with relatively good humour.

And the third is the author of this wonderful book. I had previously read his 2020 work How To Be a Liberal which is a guide to the development and growth of Liberal Democracy and the challenge of Populism. It was the sort of textbook, and he the sort of teacher, I wish I'd had at school. 

This latest book How Westminster Works has the sub-title ...and Why It Doesn't. In ten very readable chapters Ian Dunt takes the lid off the way our national life is supposed to be run. He analyses subjects such as MPs, government ministers, the Houses of Commons and Lords and the Civil Service. His conclusion is that most of the bits of government that are set up to work well have been so tweaked and abused that they are virtually useless to anyone except the executive (the PM's office). A Commons majority allows a dangerous amount of power. The one bit that should not work, an unelected second chamber, manages to do all the hard graft of refining legislation and discussing issues in a grown up way with the voices of experts listened to. In a final chapter called Solutions he revisits the question which has cropped up throughout - what should we do?

The prospect of a Labour Government with a huge majority in 2024 (or maybe2025) is growing. And so my opening question re-emerges. What might be the big political statement that costs little? I think Starmer and crew must get to grips with the ideas in this book. Because, make no mistake, many of them will take more than one electoral cycle. Labour might well have that in their grasp.

Of the things Dunt suggests a quick big statement might be to move out of Downing Street. It is obviously a useless place to work and, as he points out, a symbol of our country's desperate addiction to tradition.

Longer term I agree I would want a new administration to:

• Reform the House of Lords
• Fix the voting system
• Reward a Civil Servant for staying in the same department long-term and becoming an expert
• Move Parliament to a new, purpose-built chamber with a co-operative, rather than antagonistic, seating plan

Much of our national life has been deteriorating slowly over the last fourteen years. The triple whammy of Brexit, Covid and Ukraine  marked the point at which people noticed, because we got suddenly and obviously poorer. We need journalists like Dunt to keep working for us with analysis in depth, challenge where necessary and righteous anger that the people who should have put things right, didn't.

You should read this.

Death List

We are doing a Lent Course on the theme of 'Circle of Life' - matters of life and death. So far we've looked at making preparations for our own end and topics to do with end of life care and assisted dying.

The Bishop of Worcester is doing a future session on biblical theology so I won't tread on his toes, yet.

The other day I was preparing for bed. I had discarded my denture, hearing aids and glasses prompting my wife to suggest that there were more interesting bits of me on the bedside table than under the covers. Time to update that will.

Over the years I have found insights on death and dying from unlikely sources beyond the Christian ones you might expect me to list. Here are some of them:

Philip Pullman

The Amber Spyglass
(His Dark Materials III)

The parallel world Pullman invents for these books is occupied by a people who live with a daemon - another creature part of, yet separate to, them representing their personality. When some of these folk travel to yet another world they encounter others, who live not with their daemon but with their death as a companion. This relationship gives the people great confidence and hope - that death can be entered into with a trusted friend and holds no fear. These books are a huge feat of imagination and have some critical points to make about organised religion.

Christopher Hitchens

Mortality

Confronted with a terminal diagnosis, rather suddenly, Hitchens tackles his forthcoming conclusion with eloquence, wit and not a little anger. God remains an enemy,

Philip Gould

When I Die

We often talk about people 'battling with cancer'. I put this book down determined to stop using fighting talk in such circumstances. Maybe it is better understood as a journey together, albeit an unwanted one. This is an honest, personal and well-written biography of Gould's cancer, from which he died
. When I finished it I was moved to send more than the cost of the book to the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity.

Julian Barnes

Nothing to be Frightened Of

One of our greatest contemporary writers muses on life and death. Expect to read philosophy, autobiography, polemic and a few jokes. On Christian faith he is agnostic. 'How can we be sure that we know enough to know?' he asks.

John Humphrys and Sarah Jarvis

The Welcome Visitor

Having experienced his own father's slow and agonising death Humphrys wonders whether we might have accidentally decided to prolong our lives too much. Co-writing with a palliative care specialist he looks at recent history and asks what it might mean to have 'a good death', the 'welcome visitor' of the title.

Rio Ferdinand

Thinking Out Loud

The difference between a good footballer and an elite footballer, explains the former Manchester United and England centre-half, is that good footballers love winning whereas elite footballers hate losing. They expect to win. Every time. Ferdinand takes this analogy and explains how he found it hard to accept his wife's terminal illness. He hated losing. He couldn't imagine accepting its inevitability.

Holiday Reading 2023

Spent more holiday time than usual doing things (having retired I no longer feel the urgency of relaxation) but still managed almost eight books in a fortnight. Here are my holiday reads. I am pleased to have read a majority of women this time round. Next target is to read more African fiction. I have given a mark out of ten but it represents my enjoyment rather than a comment on the work as literature:

Devil in a Blue Dress: Walter Mosley (7)

I have always read good things about Mosley but had never read him. His most famous character is the detective Easy Rawlins. This is the book in which he was born, more a chancer than a detective in the first instance. It was a fine page-turner to start my holiday and I will be reading more. The story played out well with a context of the extra set of difficulties a black hustler faced in 1950's America.

The Men: Sandra Newman (5)

Another book I had seen much reviewed, this one more recent. What would it be like for all the world's men to vanish in an instant? I enjoyed the early passages describing the immediate problems. I felt the story of how things then turned out was underdeveloped and the glimpses into the back stories of the leading female characters a bit unnecessary. The denouement sucked. Disappointed.

Live Wire: Harlan Coben (7) 

Crime solver and sports agent Myron Bonitar is called to find a missing person. He is an interesting character, often battered and bruised but quick-witted. He has an accomplice/colleague/friend, Win, who often gets him out of trouble and hurts people when he finds it necessary, which is often. Fine story with decent twist.

Oh William! Elizabeth Strout (6)

A friend gave me this and asked me to tell him what I thought, without clue. First thing I discovered was that I was reading book three of a trilogy. It didn't matter. Protagonist Lucy Barton is a writer (and often speaks in writing). She is in good standing with William, her ex-husband, although when she spends long periods of time with him recalls why they are no longer married. But William is recently divorced (again) and Lucy has just lost her second husband so agrees to accompany William on a trip to explore his roots. I enjoyed it enough to want to read the first two; my friend said it was dull.

The Lighthouse: Alison Moore (8)

Thin novel that is easy to read but explores the rhymes and rhythms of life and the generations. Futh is a rather inadequate central character, a naïve abroad on a walking holiday for which he has made careful preparations. He seems emotionally unprepared for everything though. It is seedy, sad and eventually shocking leaving us with a 'Well, what would you do next?' Booker short-listed.

Shrines of Gaiety: Kate Atkinson (9)

One of our best working writers constructs a wonderful tale about Soho in 1926. London underlife, policing methods, missing young girls, illegal drinking and gambling dens and some wonderful characters help the reader jog along. Club owner and social climber Nellie Coker is apparently loosely based on the real life of Kate Meyrick. We expect a dramatic culmination but, as in much of life, the coming together of the characters in the story is not for ever. In a final chapter their futures are sketched out for us. An absolute joy.

The Heron's Cry: Ann Cleeves (7)

This is the second in a series about DI Matthew Venn based in North Devon, from the crime writer who gave us Shetland. It's a bit sleepy when the tourists are missing and not the sort of place you expect to find someone stabbed to death with a shard of fancy glassware. No sooner have we joined the investigation than it happens again. What's the connection?

The Far Corner: Harry Pearson (7)

This was written in the 1990s about a season following football in the north east of England, at all levels. I have a fondness for the north east having lived there for five years and a fondness for football having lived there for more than sixty. It is full of characters and local details and is very, very funny. Each short chapter is based around, and a description of, a different match.

Warwickshire

I was born in Warwickshire. Some time during my early years I found myself in the West Midlands without moving house. I was given a post-code - B29 7HW. But I've always been a child of Warwickshire in my own eyes. I now live in Worcestershire but Warwickshire is 400 metres down the road. If I look poorly I've asked to be carried across the border.

I think, even by my standards, that reviewing a book published in 1936 is leaving it a bit late. But Warwickshire, in The King's England series merits a chat. I'm glad to have it because it feels like the sort of book that ends up on a pub bookshelf as decoration when the place gets post-modernised. Now it's a £3 investment in my rescue library.

This was a book I found in the wonderful Malvern Bookshop and, although I won't be reading it cover to cover, I will make a point of looking up every local place I visit. Why? Well a few examples will help but first let us see how it ended up in my house because it bears the evidence of having been a library book.

The proprietor told me that she often bought up collections so closed-down libraries were a key source. She was such a book buff that she kept behind the counter a book full of lovely sketch illustrations of dogs, 'I will only sell it to someone who promises not to remove the pictures and sell them separately', she told me. I don't know what the staining is on the inside cover page of my book and will not be finding out.

The copy I have is a 1950 reprint. I don't know if you can, offhand, think of anything that made a substantial difference to the appearance of Warwickshire towns and cities between 1936 and 1950 but the author could. Then chose to ignore it. Which, to be fair, is what makes the text zing. Every visit to a Luftwaffe drop-zone with this text reminds you of what the place used to look like. 

Let us head to Coventry. Or maybe the wonders of the clean air and dust-free buildings turn your thoughts to the Med? Did I say buildings? What buildings? It wasn't desirable to note that they are now missing.

But I am a child of Selly Oak. (My mother now pipes up from the grave reminding us, because she was a dreadful snob about this sort of thing, that I came from Selly Park, not Selly Oak.) Whatever, I have to say I failed to notice that I was in '...one of the wonderful intellectual centres of England.' I had to walk half a mile into Edgbaston to get to one of the best schools in the country. And Selly Oak library warrants an illustration, although it is not of the building I remember which was black (from coal dust, probably), austere and next to a railway bridge.

The discussion of Selly Oak Colleges goes on the suggest that there is a possibility of a drinking vessel used at the last Supper being there. This interesting argument is slightly skewered by the inscription of the words of Jesus at that event on the goblet. Indiana Jones not heading our way.

My late Aunty Brenda was fond of saying 'I'm just going up the village' when she left the house to go to Selly Oak. It strikes me as a folk memory from a time before Birmingham came out and swallowed it, moving on in pursuit of Northfield, Rednal and Rubery

Although my favourite hard-to-visualise is the comparison of Sutton Coldfield's Parade with the famous Richmond in Surrey. Famous for being on-Thames I recall. Sutton what are you like? You misplaced the river.

I will be returning for further volumes.

Introversion and School Days

There was a history master at King Edward's School (KES) who took us at A level. He was called Charles Blount. Wore waistcoats. Bit of an upper crust accent. His teaching style was to lecture, with occasional pauses when he would question someone about something he had either covered before or reckoned should be part of the general knowledge of an Edwardian.

He went round the class in turn with his questions. Those of us who tended more to general ignorance than knowledge dreaded the moment our turn came. We could concentrate on little else as the geography of the enquiries reached our vicinity.

My first ever question in this context was 'What is anti-clericalism?' You may sense some deep prophetic undertone in this. You'd be right. Being poor at history but reasonable at vocabulary I took the phrase apart in my head and gave the answer 'A dislike of the clergy'. 'That's right' said Charles. I enjoyed the sense of relief that it would be a lesson or two before my turn came again and, furthermore, I had answered a question on a matter not yet covered. General knowledge demonstrated. Smugness.

Several weeks later, with no recollection of having answered a question correctly in the meantime and having achieved a mark of 5/20 for my first essay, there was a lesson in which the questions were getting nearer. If I was lucky I would be saved by the bell. I was not.

Then came my question. I couldn't believe my ears. 'What is anti-clericalism?' The very same, although this time it was a matter we had covered and I knew a bit more about it than could be achieved by parsing. Nevertheless I gave the same answer as it had worked before. I was shocked to hear 'No, it's more than just a dislike of the clergy, anyone else?'

Although I remained silent at such a brush off my inner monologue was raging. What is the point? Some of us are born to be wrong. I give up. I think I may have resolved that I would lose less face if I answered 'Don't know' to all further questions. Remarkably, history was my best A level and I enjoy reading history now.

There was an English master at KES called Tom Parry. He taught my class English, and history, at O level. Very Welsh. I got good grades in both subjects but he didn't seem to like me. Took every opportunity to belittle me in front of the class and was reluctant to admit I didn't need special measures.

One day he asked us, out of the blue, what we were reading for pleasure. I used to read all the time at home and had always got a novel on the go but the terror of how my personal taste would be received by my friends made my mind go blank. I ended up mentioning a couple of Ian Fleming's James Bond books and was told most people grow out of those in primary school. The Parry plaudits were saved for one who had been reading Dostoevski. KES had that sort of 15 year old.

These stories came back to mind as I read Susan Cain's book 'Quiet Power'. It is a follow-up to her best-selling 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking'.

Whilst not an extreme of the type I am introverted by personality. I didn't know that as a teenager although my parents observed I spent a lot of time alone and Mum thought it was odd. Dad didn't. He often took himself away to a quiet corner for a cigarette and a look at the newspaper.

Introverts find it hard to interact in class, are often listening when they don't look as if they are, and hate being jumped on with questions when they are unprepared. Susan Cain's follow up book is about people such as me, growing up. It is aimed at teenagers but has a chapter for parents and one for teachers too. I was the kid who needed time alone after school, or to visit a local, undemanding friend to play football or cricket in the garden, or a board game in winter. Thanks Steve. School was emotionally draining but I didn't know.

Susan Cain sees introversion as a super-power, thinking as desirable and quiet as normal. But if this quote represents you then, however late it is, you might find her two books helpful:

'Sometimes, by the time we think of the thing we truly want to say, the discussion is already over.'

Nobody is more surprised than me that I ended up with a career which involved much public-speaking. The secret, if it is a secret now I'm telling you, is this. We can do it if we're ready and prepared. I now challenge myself to do some talks unprepared without notes. It's still cheating because it is usually on a subject I've been discussing for over 40 years. Hardly unprepared. But straight after a new piece of input I won't know what I think and won't be able to discuss it. But I will be able to lead a discussion and, whilst listening to this, I will clarify my thoughts.

Fine book.

Holiday Reading Recommendations

Here are a few books I read on holiday, or recently completed, which I feel might be good away-from-it-all reads. The score out of 10 is by no means justified in any other way than the level of poolside/beach escapism each provided:

Graeme Macrae Burnett

Case Study

2020

(9/10)

This story is so realistic and convincing that I joined the vast number of people who have googled 'Collins Brathwaite' to see if the novel was based on a real person. Was this charismatic counsellor a regular guest on 1960s cult TV programme 'Late Night line Up'?

This is a cracking yarn. Narrator 'GMB' (the author?) blurs the line between fiction and faction beautifully. The story examines whether a controversial psychotherapist could have caused someone to take their own life. The deceased's sister adopts a false identity to become a patient and investigate. It does her head in.

John le Carré

Silverview

2021

(7/10)

A retired MI6 agent uses a bookshop in a sleepy seaside town as a front for some clandestine stuff. All the usual dialogue-based plot advancing we've come to expect from the master in his final novel, plus a few fine lines of political observation, '...poor, toothless, leaderless Britain ... still dreams of greatness and doesn't know what else to dream about.'

Sarah Moss

Summer Water

2020

(6/10)

I really enjoyed 'The Fell'. This, her previous book from 2020, has the same sense of foreboding and dread that something bad is going to happen, but who to? And what? It is a short, but slow, read until the final pages, which you will read too fast feeling like your roller coaster has hit the first drop. Then you'll go round again to be sure you know what happened.

Anne Tyler

Redhead by the Side of the Road

2020

(6/10)

So it's just possible that the person on Micah's doorstep claiming to be his son is telling the truth. More interesting is the impact this revelation has on the life of someone who lives by routine, once it gets thrown. Short and nicely observed.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Sympathizer

2015

(8/10)

People of my age all have the filtered and edited story of Viet Nam in our heads. It was in the years after the end of the war that the questions began. In 'The Sympathizer' Nguyen addresses these issues through a narrator who is part French, part Vietnamese, a communist trusted by the south who ends up in America. Time in the film industry leads to many discussions about the depictions of the Vietnamese in the movies. When he, nicknamed 'the bastard' because he belongs to no-one, returns to his home country he is needlessly tortured, not for secrets but to admit his own lack of knowledge and identity. Leaving us with the question 'What was all that for?' Funny, moving, gruelling, complex and thrilling. Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016.

John Banville

Snow

2021

(8/10)

My previous experience of Banville is of beautiful, but slow, writing. Here he gives his attention to the death of a priest in a country house murder mystery set in Southern Ireland in the 1950s. DI Strafford (always irritated when the first R is omitted from his name) feels the December cold as he investigates. It is not one where the bodies pile up but where the slow graft of investigation through conversation in the age just before easy mass communication reaps rewards. Splendidly done and well paced.

Broken Ghost

Niall Griffiths

2019

(9/10)

My best read of the holiday. Three people experience a strange spectral vision on a Welsh mountain top. One blogs about it. It goes viral. The place of the experience becomes a place of commune and pilgrimage. Ironically this is at the same time as the actual rehabilitation community nearby loses its funding. The three characters, one closely associated with the commune, return to their chaotic normality - for one alcohol, another sex and a third violence.

I found it easiest to read by giving a voice I knew to each main character as the chapters chop and change between them, and the narrator. So in my world:

Cerys Matthews played Emma

Iolo Williams narrated

Rhod Gilbert was Crawley

Jamie Carragher was Adam

This book is hugely important in its acknowledgement of social problems and authority. It is quite sad but very real. Redemption is dangled and reached for. Who can hang on?

The Appeal

Janice Hallett

2021

(8/10)

This is a very unusual page-turner. A Head of Chambers asks two Junior Counsel to read a file of evidence - mainly messages, emails and transcripts with the occasional post-it note. He asks them who they think was murdered, why, who went to prison and whether that was the right decision.

We read the same documents as them.

They have a stab and are then given some more info. The context of the crime is members of an Amdram society putting on a play at the same time as raising money for a sick child.

Some of the insights into village life are extraordinarily perceptive and funny. But do enjoy solving the case. I picked up a couple of clues but did not piece it all together until the denouement.

Also recommended this year:

T.J.Newman - Falling (page turner airplane hijack thriller) (7/10)

Abigail Dean - Girl A (forensic exploration of siblings rescued from abusive parenting) (8/10)

Steve Cavanagh - The Devil's Advocate (courtroom and thrilling - the new Grisham) (7/10)

Steve Cavanagh - Twisted (7/10)

Chris Brookmyre - The Cut (murder, mystery, thriller) (7/10)

Dave Eggers - The Every (trying to stop big tech taking over the world) (8/10)

Danile Wiles - Mercia's Take (life of a Black Country miner in the C19th) (9/10)

Amor Towles - The Lincoln Highway (road-trip in the wrong direction; beautiful characters) (10/10)

Tim Weaver - No One Home (three couples, one hamlet, all missing) (8/10)

Colson Whitehead - Harlem Shuffle (furniture shop owner does petty crime on the side then gets caught up in something bigger) (8/10)

The Godless Gospel

 

If you are unfamiliar with the work of populist philosopher Julian Baggini then this may not be quite the place to start. My introduction to him was the best-seller The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten: And 99 Other Thought Experiments. Which made me think.

In The Godless Gospel (Was Jesus a Great Moral Teacher?) (Granta 2020) Baggini attempts to remove Jesus' moral teaching from its theological framework to see if there is anything to help those who don't want to swallow the whole God thing.

It is an interesting exercise, applauded  on the jacket by no less than Richard Holloway, he who wrote Godless Morality whilst still an Archbishop although he has since moved nearer to godless than god-fearing.

Does it work? There is good stuff in the opening sections, especially about individual attitude, humility and the process of doing thinking. He acknowledges that reading the gospel is not like reading a modern treatise on moral philosophy. It is not an argument to be followed but a biography to be pondered. Whether you can think about it clearly whilst dismissing the thing that holds it all together is the big question. The attempt to distance Jesus' teaching from his understanding of God, the Father, in whom he trusted and who he believed he served, seems, to me, to pull on a thread that unravels everything.

The last third of the book is a new version of the Gospel, replacing mentions  of God with 'good' in many cases and yet leaving references to prayer unaltered. If there was no God and he was mistaken about praying then surely the whole of Jesus' manifesto implodes? The parable of the kingdom and the return of the king are included. To be fair, Baggini discuses this at length but we draw different conclusions.

Annoyingly Baggini chooses to word his Gospel harmonisation in the language of the Authorised Version because he prefers the poetry. Which makes it harder, not easier, to follow. Living words need lively translation, not archiving or confining to the theatre. 

Interesting effort and nicely written but I wasn't convinced. The Gospel writers all, for sure, had axes to grind and used what Karen Armstrong calls mythos to make their points. But they wrote that we might have life in all its fulness in Jesus' name (John says this directly), not that we might pick and choose which bits we like.

Silbury Hill

I like to read a local book when staying away from home. It's a habit I began about twenty years ago when I happened to read Captain Corelli's Mandolin on a Mediterranean island and, even though it was the wrong island, the book came alive.

We've been staying a few miles down the road from home, in Castle Combe; proof positive that you don't have to get away far to get away. In a bookshop in nearby Corsham I asked the friendly proprietor what to read. I wanted something that wasn't a guide book but was good writing, evocative of the area. She gave me a fine selection but On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe stood out. It has been an amazing companion; a metaphysical, biographical introduction to the area known as the Wiltshire Downlands covering six millennia of history from Neolithic times.

We went to Avebury and Silbury Hill. As Adam Thorpe (almost the same age as me) recalls his Marlborough College school-days so I recalled my own, not least because in about 1967 I came there on a school trip.

To be fair I can remember only one incident clearly from the trip. Walking from what was probably then the coach park to the hill we were approaching a gate and Max Oates ran at it and cleared it in, what I later found out was actually called, a gate-vault. Max arrived at King Edwards (a place that gave an experience not unlike Marlborough but was not a boarding school and thus reduced the bullying hours somewhat) as a highly proficient gymnast and diver. My reaction, as one who had been convinced that getting into King Edwards was a verdict on my all-round genius, was 'Why can't I do that?' It was one of the first of many steps to realising that in order to really get on you have to be more than a smart kid. I grew up in a big old house but it was rundown and we had little money for much of my school-days.  I got a free place through the entry examination. But I hadn't had gym classes, diving lessons or the pushy parents to lead me to young specialism. Indeed I spent my secondary school days trying out every new opportunity and moving on. Fives, squash, hockey, rugby, cricket, tennis - I never settled, always looking wistfully over my shoulder at the sacrifice of going to a school that thought rugby football was the only type of football worth playing. I also had undiagnosed asthma, which meant my shortness of breath when running was treatable (and eventually was, aged 24) but I merely thought I wasn't very good at it and kept trying harder.

Silbury Hill is an enigma. The conclusion of most experts, after two to three hundred years of modern archaeology, is that they don't know what it is. It is a thirty metre high mound in the middle of a huge natural downland amphitheatre. It is the largest human-made mound in the world and is near the largest standing stone circle in the world. The secret it has revealed is that it was human-made over a couple of  hundred years and has at least twelve cycles of layering. It reminds me of a a cairn where every newcomer places a stone. Except that generations have placed huge layers of chalk, turf and sandstone without, or at least without us being able to tell, if of any of them had the first idea of what the point was.

So today it just sits there, next to a busy road. Visitors are not allowed to climb because of erosion although we saw two do so during our brief visit. They would have had to squeeze through a gap, ignore two notices and climb a fence so I guess they knew what they were doing. Walking a mile away to West Kennet Long Barrow the Silbury Hill becomes small - looks like a spoil heap in the wrong place.

The Standing Stones, Barrow and Hill are accessible without paying. It has managed to resist becoming the downlands visitor experience although there is some of that in the museum and nearby Avebury Manor and Gardens (National Trust). Otherwise local agriculture simply lives and works alongside.

On a grey February day the place conjured up all sorts of alternative thoughts. It's not what some theologians call a 'thin place'. I felt it was a full place. When we don't know what something means everyone has a go at defining it. It's become somewhere with too much meaning - none of it that helpful. It's a reminder of people keeping their eyes on something bigger, grander and out there. A striving for meaning. A desire that the point of all this be something other than my own self-actualisation. Which is, at the very minimum, what the Christian Gospel does; it anchors the truth elsewhere.

Avebury and Silbury change your vision by looking at the work of people who bothered to change their horizon. The lack of clarity about why they did it leaves their work as the record of a universal question.

The book is a knowledegable friend on the same journey.

Influential Books

I love reading the question and answer interviews in Sunday supplements. Given how unlikely it is that anyone will ever want to publish my answers I thought I'd have a go at the question about 'influential reads'. I reckon all books influence me, even if it is to eliminate the author from my future enquiries. But what tomes really changed me? If we are honest they are rarely the books alleged to be 'improving'.

Here are ten. They may not be quite the top ten because I didn't want to overthink. I may do ten more later. The order, by the way, is the order in which I read them:

Aboard the Bulger
Ann Scott Moncrieff
1935

Not very old I was taken to Selly Oak library by my Dad. Here I was amazed. We didn't have many books in our house but Dad was always reading. So this is the secret. Borrow them and take them back. For nothing. Wow. This was the first book I borrowed. I read it wrapped in an eiderdown on my bedroom floor in front of an inadequate electric fire.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (Increasingly improbable trilogy)

Douglas Adams

1979

Adams probably stands in a long line of great word-play authors but I had slowed my reading habit between the age of 12 and 18, perfectly undoctrinated by a school literature list which failed to move this adolescent teenage male at all. I read nothing but cheap thrillers from 1973-1979. Then this. Someone told me I should read it so I didn't because I am a recommender not a recomendee. Then I did. If writing can be like this, breaking the rules once you understand them, then it made me want to write. A few years later I had a go.

'The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.' One of my favourite lines of all time.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M Pirsig

1974

The Late Review used to be tagged on to the end of Newsnight but I saw some precursor of it around the time this book was published. I probably (aged 19 or 20) thought the discussion was a load of pretentious rot. I can't recall. It would have been late night midweek and once I started work I only ever stayed up midweek to watch the footie.

Anyway I found a copy in St John's College Library sometime around 1983/4 and, as an enquiring theological student, felt that it was rebellious to read something not on any lecturer's book list. Zen Christianity has accompanied me ever since and I swear that having a cool head in a crisis is something I decided to have rather than was born with.

I also learned that there is usually a good reason why some books get reviewed and others don't.

Illywhacker

Peter Carey

1985

College, despite my previous post, did get in the way of reading for pleasure. Then, in my first curacy in Nottingham, I met some lovely new friends who helped by lending some books they had enjoyed once I had announced at a dinner party that I was fed up with the quality of my reading. At the same time I started enjoying bookshops (libraries were going a bit downhill) and (yes, design does matter) the boxed-out Faber and Faber logo always caught my eye.

This epic narrative about coming-to-terms with what Australia actually is, narrated by a confidence trickster and liar, was a lucky find. It meant a lot that, despite Carey being a double-Booker winner and well-known, I had not heard of him before I bought this book and, having now read everything he has ever written and only found one book I didn't really enjoy, feel I discovered him for myself. I always recommend him, knowing that the reaction will be a bit Vegimity.

Dispatches from the Front Line of Popular Culture

Tony Parsons

1994

This sat on the shelf above my desk for many years when I worked in the late lamented youth department of the Christian home mission agency CPAS (Church Pastoral Aid Society). All the other staff bookshelves seemed to be full of things conservative evangelicals are supposed to read. All you imagine they ever learned was the result of a massive echo chamber. It seems to me that teaching people to live the gospel in contemporary society is pretty hopeless if you have no clue how contemporary society works, what it means and who the movers and shakers are. This set of columns, articles and essays from 1976-1994 was a priceless journeymate. What does it mean to be a Christian amongst this?

Passage to Juneau

Jonathan Raban

1999

Robert Runcie - The Reluctant Archbishop

Humphrey Carpenter

1996

The Case for God

Karen Armstrong

20009

These three books changed my attitude to genre. If all travel books were written like Jonathan Raban writes I would read them all. I would read about anything if Jonathan Raban held my hand. Even a yacht journey from Seattle to Juneau.

Likewise Carpenter taught me to read biography if the biographer can write and Karen Armstrong renewed my sense of enjoyment in theology

Unapologetic

Francis Spufford

2012

Some books help like a session of psychotherapy. You rarely know which one it will be. Spufford's sub-title is 'Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense'. As I read I found that he had written what I wanted to say. Christianity does give me a place of emotional safety from where I can explore the intellectual complexities of doing theology. If I had spent the first term at College reading this it would have saved a lot of time.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

2011

Having read a book that explained to me who I am this was the book that helped me understand everybody else. What is going on when people make decisions? How do we choose? Why do we decide some weighty matters without all the necessary information?

Well, to use a technique that the book describes, I'll answer an easier question than those. Should you read this? Yes. In fact you should study it.

Holiday Reading

Here are the results of my holiday reading this year. The mark out of ten I offer is not related to literary merit or any sense of genre importance. I use it simply to tell you how diverting the book was as a holiday read:

Pete Paphides - Broken Greek (8/10)
Pete is a music journalist from a Greek family based in Birmingham. This autobiographical book covers his childhood and early teenage years. The pull of the music industry was strong but the peer pressure that formed his early opinions was also influential. As a Brummie who recognises both the landscape and the chart-music of my young adult years (I am older than the author) I loved this journey.


Ben Machell - The Unusual Suspect (9/10)
Ben is a newspaper columnist and feature-writer. This is the account of Stephen Jackley. He was an Asperger's student so his decision making was unconventional. Channelling Robin Hood he began, in 2007, a life of crime designed to help the poor by robbing banks and building societies. It didn't go as well as he expected.


Simon Mayo - Knife Edge (7/10)
Yes, that Simon Mayo. Page-turner, thriller, bit short on likelihood but ticked the boxes for a quick read.


Bill Bryson - The Body (7/10)
A very entertaining account of the different bits of our bodies and how progress into understanding them was made. No need to read in one go. Fit in a chapter here and there between novels. And rejoice that you were born when you were.


Val McDermid - Still Life (8/10)
The very undisputed queen of the police procedural at the top of her game.


Francine Toon - Pine (7/10)
Slow-developing, ghostly gothic Halloween weirdness in a Scottish community. Delightfully creepy with portentous moments regularly spooking the reader.

Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street (9/10)
Two children, a weird guy and a cat take it in turns to narrate this story. All are unreliable witnesses at one time or another. Not so much a whodunnit as a who did what to whom and when? Brilliant.

Review of the Year

For the last six months I've been posting a weekly Facebook link to my highlights of the week in popular culture. Or maybe unpopular culture would be better? You know me.

On balance it is worth doing this as well though. I like trying to work out what was the best of the year, especially last year which didn't have many bests in it.

Music

My favourite individual tunes of 2020 are on this link to Spotify. It seems to have been a year when my spirits were raised by three chords and jangly guitars. Nowt wrong with that.

For album of the year I often struggle. New music is simply music you haven't heard before. As I do not listen to much radio I quite often 'discover' music that's been around a bit. Which meant it was great to find the Billy Franks' back catalogue and Man Alive by The 4 of Us (which I had on cassette in the car in the 1990s) make their way onto Spotify. But that said I enjoyed:

EOB - Earth

Foals - Collected Remixes

HAIM - Women in Music Pt. III 

Khruangbin - Mordecai

Surprise Chef - All News is Good News

Westerman - Your Hero is Not Dead

Zapatilla - Zapatilla

Reading

I read more books in 2020 than any year since records began (1988). But how many were written in 2020? Not many. Plaudits to:

Fiction

Andrew Hunter Murray - The Last Day

Daisy Johnson - Sisters

Catherine Lacey - Pew

Fact

Adam Rutherford - How to Argue with a Racist

Screen

In TV/Film I caught up with many box-sets during lock-down using a Prime subscription and latterly Netflix. Like many others our favourite film of the year was Armando Iannucci's spirit-lifting The Personal History of David Copperfield.

But I found the year much-improved by Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders, Bones (plots become increasingly improbable by Season 5), The Good Fight and Brokenwood.

Food

Wapping Wharf

I only had three or four meals out all year but all were nice. My usual haunt of WB at Wapping Wharf is always good but Gambas Tapas just along from there is also excellent.

I missed my couple of times a year at the Pony and Trap at Chew but found the yurt version at Breaking Bread on the Downs very acceptable for a wedding anniversary. In April the Pony and Trap at Chew is changing its focus to a foraging and training centre with meals for volunteers on the estate. But they are opening a restaurant in Bedminster. Hooray.

Clifton Downs Yurts

On a north Wales holiday I discovered that Cadwaladers ice-cream in Criccieth was as good as ever. Also that Grasmere Gingerbread can be mail-ordered.

Here's to better things to review away from home in 2021.

Book Reviews

Interesting, and completely accidental, juxtaposition of novels this week. The linking theme being voice, or lack of it.

Vox explores an imagined USA from the not-too-distant future where power is held by a group of white males led by a cruel and tyrannical evangelical Christian minister. Separating out those who are 'pure' the gay, ethnic minorities and women are all marginalised. For women it's not quite Stepford. No-one has yet pioneered the surgery necessary to bring that about. So women are required to wear a bracelet which delivers a short, sharp shock if they say more than 100 words a day.

It's pretty frightening, given the state of the current Christian right in the USA. The interesting premise develops into a classic thriller and the last 100 pages pass quickly.

In Pew a sleepy US town is visited by one who doesn't speak, named by the locals after the place this stranger is found spending a night. The desire to be hospitable, in this place of Christian principles, to a struggling newcomer is tested by the lack of communication. How can we know how to help you if you don't tell us your story? Is the muteness a preference? Is it post-trauma? Or something more sinister?

In Christina Dalcher and Catherine Lacey we have two novelists right on top of their game and two interesting approaches to the necessity of language.

Holiday Reading

There is a summary of my holiday reading. The marks out of ten are based on enjoyment and escapism rather than any splendid literary quality.

Jane Harper - The Lost Man (8/10)
I enjoyed The Dry, Jane Harper's first crime novel set in a remote part of Australia. This is her third, so I missed one. I read The Lost Man on the hottest driest day of the year so far in the UK. It is set in the Outback where near neighbours are a three hour drive away and everyone tells someone else when they are setting out solo to fix a fence. So how did Cameron Bright come to die alone without shade, shelter, his car, phone or water, miles from anywhere or anyone?

This story unpicks family feuds, local rivalries and complex relationships under the intense glare of the Sun. Did someone do something? What did they do? Who did it? A very satisfying page-turner. It'll make you thirsty for more.


Ben Smith - Doggerland (9/10)
To examine human behaviour, one tool an author has in their box is to remove almost all outside influences. Ben Smith achieves that by having two characters (Boy and Old Man although we are left to guess their ages) charged with the maintenance of an enormous wind farm. They are alone, reliant on the one other character, the deliverer of supplies. Why are they there? What dramatic event led to their dystopian existence? What happened to the boy's much-discussed father? This is a slow page-turner, beautifully sparse. Not unlike Magnus Mills.


Tom Drury - The End of Vandalism (10/10)
Seventy-odd characters wander into this story of life in Grouse County. We are treated to a little of all their back-stories. Sometimes in detail; sometimes just a tease. 'She considered dog issues her speciality, and once, at a convention in Moline, had given a slide presentation on the history of the muzzle.' Do you have questions now? I do.

In my literary world Peter Carey writes the best books, Tom Wolf the best chapters, Douglas Adams the best sentences. Tom Drury is a contender for best-paragraphs.

Before blotting his reputation somewhat, Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon was the place to go for this sort of thing. In a foreword introduction another of my literary heroes Jon McGregor suggests that anyone embarking upon this book will, inevitably, become an evangelist for Tom Drury. It is the case.


Andrew Hunter-Murray - The Last Day (8/10)
A second post-apocalyptic novel during a pandemic holiday. This one's conceit is that the Earth has slowly stopped rotating leaving half with permanent cold-dark-night, half with hot-light-day and a narrow band in the centre which is habitable. The author is that bloke from off the tele who takes supporting roles in The Mash Report, and is also a QI elf and a Private Eye journalist. This is his first novel. It's clever and gripping.


Neil Oliver - The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places (9/10)
I like to have a book like this close at hand. 100 short chapters explore Britain in roughly chronological order from 950,000 years BCE to the present day. I did history to A level. It was kind of forced upon me by being the only other timetable option if I wanted to do Geography and Statistics, which I did.

If this book had been available then I probably wouldn't have read it, because I wasn't that sort of kid. But read now, fifty years too late, it makes sense of how all those bits of the curriculum and primary school history stories fit together. I loved it.

It opens for debate if you would have picked the same one hundred places. I think I would have wanted to see Jarrow in there somewhere. At the same time as I was reading, the statue/slavery discussion rose up in the UK. It occurred to me, as I read up about Black Lives Matter, that the chapter on abolition is told from a white point of view and there are black martyrs missing from the story.

It has slightly more Scottish places than I would have expected but I came to see that Scotland has punched well above its weight in contribution to the history of the islands here. So that is not so much a criticism as an acknowledgement of my own ignorance.


Joel Dicker - The Baltimore Boys (9/10)
Moving about in time from the 1960s (briefly) to date, this story is of four childhood friends. Not all related to each other but who came to feel like family. Marcus Goldman, one of the four, is a writer and narrates the story from 2012. Dicker used this character to narrate his excellent, previous novel The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair.

In this latest story we are told, on the jacket, that 24/11/04 is 'The day of the tragedy'. It is written in five parts:

The book of lost youth 1989-97
The book of the lost brotherhood 1998-2001
The book of the Goldmans 1960-89
The book of the tragedy 2002-04
The book of atonement 2004-12

So for the bulk of the novel we know that there is going to be a tragedy (and there are minor tragedies and triumphs on the journey too) but not what it will be. We know from sentence 1 of a prologue that Woody, one of the four, was about to go to prison for five years, a month before the 'tragedy'.

It's a delightful book. Very easy to read and hard to put down.

Book Review

I will probably catch up, over the next few weeks, on some blog ideas I've sketched out but not posted.

We were in Cornwall recently and I like, if I can, to read some local works while on holiday. I found this book thoroughly eulogised in a small Falmouth book shop. Big up to independent bookshops and also, if you're ever there, to Beer Wolf a pub/bookshop in Falmouth. Perfect combo.

Philip Marsden is a writer who lives in Cornwall. Moving from a home by the sea to an isolated farmhouse he speaks of the history of place and landscape. Beautiful Cornwall is in many places artificial - spoil heaps and mine tops look graceful and heritagy now. Once they steamed and belched. 15% of the world's minerals can be found in Cornwall.

His technique is to wander and walk. 'Private' notices do not halt him. He simply brazens it out and chats with the first person he encounters about their work and their life. More often than not he gets a cup of tea rather than prosecuted as a trespasser, like we would be.

He is gently spiritual in his respect for place. He is knowledgeable about flora and fauna. Place names are demythologised. Sentences are Rabanesque (I can pay no higher compliment).

The book was published in 2014. It won all sorts of awards and cover appreciation is written by such travel/landscape luminaries as Jan Morris and Clare Balding.

Opinions?

Where do your opinions come from?

I have posted before about ideas. Research has, I believe, shown that original ideas are very rare and fewer than 1 in 20 people have them. Johnny Baker said 'Originality is forgetting where you found something.'

Most of us who get labelled 'creative' from time to time are usually doing our best with material reassembled to fit rather than being in the ex nihilo game.

But what about your opinions? I have, from time to time, been guilty of not deciding what I thought about a particular piece of art until I had read the reviews. But I like to think I know my mind. I know what I like and I like what I know.

This set of thoughts started upon me last Saturday as I was reading a Guardian article about Angela Merkel by Tim Cook of Apple. I realised that I had never formed an opinion of Merkel the person before. She had been part of my life (in that I kept hearing her quoted) for some years but I treated her with ambivalence. I didn't know if I thought she was a good thing or a bad thing but she was simply there. Then Tim Cook praised her and, before I had a chance to stop myself and examine my working, I thought 'Yes. That's what I think.' Somehow it fits my package of opinions on other matters if she is a good thing.

We've all met people who bear the opinions of the last person they spoke to. I had one colleague once whose previous company could be deduced by what he was talking about. 'You think that? I heard James say that once. Haven't you just been talking to James?' I never said these things to him and names may have been changed.

Earlier this year I was doing some interviewing. Reviewing how the candidates had done on each question I remarked that I thought one person had done well on a particular question and discovered that everyone else in the room disagreed. Since the meeting was moving to appointing a candidate I was happy with I did not labour the matter and chose silence for a while. Given that experience, anything I said may have made my preference less likely,

The interesting thing though was that every candidate gave the same answer to the question in question. But one was a bit more emotional about it and, in engagement with the questioner, was persuaded to give a bit more information out. It was the sort of subject where making a quick decision was done far better by taking the emotion out of the situation. I wouldn't have got the job unless I showed my working really well.

Elections and referendums show that many people get their opinions from habit and don't revisit their working. They do Level 1 thinking because Level 2 is too hard. Read Daniel Kahneman if this thought is new to you.

In a second hand bookshop the other day I found this book. It is a collection of Oliver Burkemann's wonderful columns from the Guardian over the years. Each piece is based on his response to popular self-help writing. I love the idea of not bothering to find your passion or your comfort zones. I also note that introverts are under-rated.

Where am I going with this? Not very far. Simply to say that most people manage to work out how they operate for the best without reading a book. It's the old joke isn't it:

Excuse me, where are the self-help books?

If I told you sir, that would defeat the object.

But most people don't come ready-armed with opinions. They develop them over the years in the company of other people. A group of people, persuaded by the most compelling member of the group on each particular matter, becomes an echo chamber.

So, to summarise, to develop life skills you don't need as much help as you think. To form an opinion you need more. That will be twenty guineas.

The Second Sleep

I love Robert Harris and was delighted to be given this for my birthday, in hardback so still feeling very new. I hadn't read any reviews so put it in the reading pile, near the front for when I wanted a page-turner.

I have now finished it. It's a brilliant book but I wondered whether I dare review it, for any summary runs the risk, in this particular case, of giving too much away. Even what I am about to say will invite you to take more care over the opening chapters with a 'Can't fool me' attitude.

The jacket says: '1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor.'

And this is the book's opening. Yet soon a twist that leaves you re-reading the first pages again to see how you missed the clues that this is not quite about what you think it is about. Those things you thought were the author's errors? Not so much. Should have known better.

The romp continues. A page-turner. A great story with a late medieval background. Yet a story that asks questions of us today, how we live, what we value and what will be our legacy.

Finishing it I chose to read some reviews to see how great reviewers had tackled the conundrum. They simply gave it away.

Even the amateur reviewers on Amazon and such sites were more cautious to be gentle with fellow-readers.

So, if it's not too late, go out and get this and read it without finding anything out. Then consider how you might vote.

Thought for the Day

As delivered this morning at BBC Radio Bristol. The previous story was about a crane-driver who composed tunes from his cab in his 'waiting' time. Quite cool ones, actually:

In one of my favourite songs by a band no-one else has heard of the Irish musicians The Four of Us wrote:

I wanna burst outside this canned reality

I wanna turn it around and see it like the way it's meant to be

They may not have known that they were channelling St Paul's:

Now see see through a glass darkly

Then we shall see face to face

And he was channelling Plato's cave allegory. That's far enough back.

Thing is. We all benefit from standing in someone else's shoes, seeing things from another's point of view. It's no surprise to me that a crane driver finds his view of the world a creative place.

I'm reading Robert Macfarlane's book Underland. He writes about places - landscape, nature and people. His latest is about the ground beneath our feet; under-city worlds, huge caves, mines, burials and offerings. The underworld. Seeing the world with him by looking up at it, the opposite of Spencer Fley's craneview, has been eye-opening. It helps that Macfarlane writes as the angels might.

When people ask what my faith means to me; how it works, what difference it makes I often see a sense of longing in the eyes of the enquirer. 'I wish I had your faith.' But you can't. Nobody can. It's mine and not yours. It's my world-view. It's my crane or cave.

If you dared a prayer today may it be one taught to the boy Samuel 'Speak Lord; for your servant is listening.'

Today is the 11th September. 9/11. A day which gave us an altogether different view of how the world was. Try and make peace with it.

Non-fiction

I am currently reading, and loving, Robert Macfarlane's Underland. On the basis of the first 100 pages it is going to be my favourite non-fiction book of all time. This got me wondering what my top five are, currently.

I think my criteria would be:

1. Something that adds to the sum of my knowledge in an area where I am already interested.

2. Something that persuades me to be interested in a subject about which I know nothing.

Here is my list. It nearly included some academic theology, sport and biography but, with apologies to Nick Hornby, Andrew Lincoln and Humphrey Carpenter, these made the cut:


Passage to Juneau
Jonathan Raban
Picador 1999

This came under category 2. I have never been at all interested in sailing although the sea had some attractiveness when viewed from a sturdy platform. I toyed with the idea of the navy but the navy successfully put me off during a course designed to put me on.

Then I read a newspaper review of this book. It caught my imagination, I think because the writing was praised as much as the subject matter. Quite rightly.

Recreating a 1000 mile sea voyage north from his home in Seattle, Raban speaks of the myths and truths of the sea as only an experienced mariner traveller can. During the voyage he explores ancient documents and his inner world, reaching some dramatic places and conclusions.



Prisoners of Geography
Tim Marshall
Elliott and Thompson 2015

I enjoyed many games of Risk as a child, quickly working out that the places that could be attacked from few sides were the most easily defended. Who knew that this would be the key to the dominance of the actual world as well? The winners were always going to be the people who populated North America. The Europeans are separated by so many mountain ranges and rivers they will never get on without some sort of union. The Russians need an ice-free port. The arbitrary way former empires carved up the territory of people who already didn't like each other very much was never going to be a recipe for peace. Why is the world like it is? Easy to understand if you have this book.


Mark Forsyth
The Elements of Eloquence
Icon 2013

I was given a good grounding in English by my two schools and owe the second one an apology for under-achieving. What my education gave me was an ear for a phrase which sounds right. When the writer hits a sweet-spot. And how to notice a dud.

What I failed to allow my education to give me is a knowledge of the science behind this. I didn't develop an interest until Junior did English Language A level and we chatted about how language works and both read David Crystal.

This book, a gift from a friend, added science to my natural ear. It answered questions I didn't know were worth asking, such as why we play ping pong and not pong ping, why Please Please Me is a good song title and why we say knives and forks when we mean cutlery (that's a merism, by the way).

Excuse the errors. It wasn't enallage it was clumsiness.


The Essential Difference
Simon Baron-Cohen
Allen Lane 2003

Men are from Mars Women are from Venus popularised the long-discussed idea that males and females see the world differently. Simon Baron-Cohen, interestingly, does an academic version of what his brother Sacha does through the medium of comedy. Sacha disguises himself as an unusual person in order to deconstruct mainstream thought. Simon analyses unusual people to find out what makes them different.

He does find differences between male and female brains - some because of nature and some nurture. One year old babies faced with videos of cars or people did divide on gender grounds. But not all men are better at stacking the dish-washer than all women. But, by and large, his research showed a male interest in systems over people and for women the opposite.

Reading this I understood myself better. It was sobering to read that people with my score, on his self-assessment paper, had, in the past, been given an autism statement.  I fell one step short of being an acute systematising male. Which makes me a cute, systematising male. You knew that.


Unapologetic
Francis Spufford
Faber and Faber 2012

The more biblical I get the more liberal I find myself. Which has always begged the question as to what speaker I might take people to hear, or what book I might give them, to explain why I am still able to own the insult 'Christian'.

When all has been deconstructed what is left? An ethics teacher once told me that when you deconstruct a light bulb you are left with everything but illumination. True. But there is no need to deconstruct a light-bulb if the manufacturer is still around to show you how it was made.

Spufford deconstructs nothing. He constructs an emotional defence (wrong word because he wasn't attacked) of hanging on to a dream, a story, a meta-narrative that there is some other. Not in the gaps that human understanding will one day bridge but so far so beyond and above that only the Christian story can pull it together and provide a base from which to explore.

First time I've read the story of someone who is emotionally content to be an ordinary Christian, although an extraordinary writer.