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--> Review of Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense (Faber and Faber, 2012). This is the only book on the Michael Ramsey Prize shortlist that I had already read.   In the spirit of the enterprise, I re-read it so that I could review it alongside its fellow nominees.   I enjoyed it as much on the second read as I had on the first. This is, quite simply, an excellent book.   It is very well written, by turns profound, insightful, irreverent and funny.   Spufford’s conceit is to write a book to explain why he is weird enough to go to church.   In order to do that, he offers an account of faith that draws on and speaks to contemporary culture.   There are lots of references to popular culture in here.   Don’t skip the footnotes, they are where some of his best, funniest and most barbed comments are to be found.   Take this one as an example: ‘Everyone...

Review of Benigno P. Beltran, Faith and Struggle on Smokey Mountain: Hope for a Planet in Peril (Orbis, 2012). If all the books on the Michael Ramsey Prize shortlist are as good as this, then I’m in for a treat!   It is good to have an author on the shortlist who is not from the UK or the US.   Beltran is from the Philippines.   A Roman Catholic priest, and a teacher of theology, Beltran has also been the chaplain to the most notorious rubbish dump in the world – Smokey Mountain in Manilla.   Here around 25 000 people lived as scavengers, and became a symbol of both poverty and the ecological degradation of the world. This is a deceptively short book.   It is both moving and challenging.   It also covers several different genres.   Most obviously, it is autobiographical.   Benigno Beltran was a Pilipino priest who was sent to study in Rome.   He returned to the Philippines to train seminarians.   On h...

I want you to imagine for a moment that the Dean of Derby preached this morning, a sermon of erudite and orthodox Anglican theology.  Then this evening, along comes the reforming Canon Chancellor and purports to correct, nay to refute the Dean’s teaching, accusing him of popish heresy and of ignoring the Scriptures.  And that this is a pattern that overall continues for several years.  This is, of course, not what is happening here tonight.  I do not stand here to refute the Dean’s heresies.  Rather I stand here to speak of a man for whom this experience of sermon and counter-sermon was a regular occurrence.  The man is Richard Hooker, and he has come to be seen as the greatest apologist for Anglicanism, and even by some as the inventor of Anglicanism! To understand how this came about, we must look a little at what had happened to the Church of England in his lifetime.  Richard Hooker was born in Heavitree near Exeter ...

“It is for me,” wrote Karl Barth to Paul Tillich, “a very special phenomenon that we understand one another so well and cordially at the human level but materially, … we can only contradict and oppose one another from the very foundation up!” [1]  Barth and Tillich enjoyed one another’s company, but theologically they were poles apart.  The cordial relations did not stop Barth writing to a wife of a former student, congratulating her husband that he had made “the necessary attack on Tillich’s abominable theology.” [2]   Barth, I think far more than Tillich, found this tension made their relationship difficult.  I will make a few references to Barth as I try to assess Tillich’s work, but it should be clear that in hearing about Paul Tillich we are entering a very different world to that which the curate spoke about last week. Paul Tillich was born in Starzeddel in Germany on 20 th August, 1883.   He was a son of the Vicarage, and hi...