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Review of: Graham Tomlin, Looking through the Cross: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book 2014 (Bloomsbury, 2013). £9.99 in Derby Cathedral Bookshop. Various Authors, Reflections for Lent 2014 (Church House Publishing, 2013). £3.99 in Derby Cathedral Bookshop. Lent is traditionally a season for thinking and taking time to read a bit deeper into the Christian faith.   Each year the Archbishop of Canterbury commissions a Lent Book from a writer of note, and this year is no exception.   Graham Tomlin, the Dean of St Mellitus College, London has written Looking through the Cross .   Commissioned by Rowan Williams, but introduced by Justin Welby, this is a book marking the transition between Archbishops.   That it began as talks to Holy Trinity, Brompton is perhaps appropriate. Tomlin’s uses the action of looking as the key to his approach to the cross.   In his first two chapters, this is looking at the cross, to see...

Review of Eugene H. Peterson, Eat this Book: A Conversation in the art of Spiritual Reading (Eerdmans, 2006). Best known as the translator of the Bible into The Message translation, Eugene Peterson is a pastor and spiritual guide.   This is a simply marvellous book that introduces what it means for Christians to read the Bible.   It is broad in its outlook, focussed in its application and generous in its spirit.   I thoroughly recommend it. Peterson begins from the observation that “in order to read the Scriptures adequately and accurately, it is necessary at the same time to live them” (p. xii).   Thus he takes his theme from Revelation 10.9-10, when the Seer is given a scroll to eat.   Peterson, with an imaginative move that characterises his approach, links this to Isaiah’s vision of a lion growling over his prey (Isaiah 31.4).   He notes that the Hebrew verb translated as ‘growls’ in Isaiah is more usually translated...