Simon Says ...

I was very sad to learn of the death of Sue Townsend.  A self-taught writer, who knew life through hard and good alike, she was a great figure in the literary canon.  Her humour was her strongest asset, and through humour she could be touching or deeply political.  Her novel about the royal family showed her republicanism, but the touching way that she wrote about the Queen showed a humanity that underlay everything that she wrote.  The last novel of hers that I read was The Woman who went to Bed for a Year : a satire on contemporary society, a telling comedy of relations between the sexes, and an apologetic for suburban Britain, and just damned funny.  I remember listening to her on Test Match Special, speaking of her love for cricket, her blindness and her writing.  There was no self-pity, but a warmth that shone through all her trials. Above all, Sue Townsend was known for Adrian Mole, and I can't be the only one who will mourn Adrian's death a...

Walter Wink died on 10th May .  He was a great scholar of the New Testament, but more than that he helped others to read the Bible and to model their lives upon it. I was fortunate enough to hear Walter Wink at the Greenbelt Festival in the early 1990s.  He spoke about the powers and about how Christians should read the Bible.  He offered his party piece Bible study on the sermon on the mount, involving someone stripping down to their shorts, was a powerful demonstration that the Bible has a social context and a radical meaning.  I bought the first two books on the Powers at that Greenbelt and devoured them.  Sometime later, I bought a copy of Engaging the Powers , and found a superbly written synthesis of biblical theology informed by a massive range of sources. Wink was often misunderstood.  His audience at Greenbelt halved, once some realised that he wasn't speaking of the Powers in a way that accorded with the Frank Peretti school of de...