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Review of Frances Young, God’s Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2012). The final book on the Michael Ramsey Prize shortlist for 2016 is a work of systematic theology.   Frances Young is a very distinguished theologian.   Her writing on the New Testament and early Christian theology is well known and is part of a corpus of writing that dates back to the 1970s.   This book is an integration of all the different concerns of her theological life, as an academic, a theologian of both the New Testament and the early church, a Methodist, a preacher and the mother of a profoundly disabled child, Arthur.   All of these different aspects to Young’s work and writing inform and shape this book. That theme of integration is also the way in which Young approaches the topics of her theology in this book.   In each chapter she offers a prelude of snapshots, showing the way the subjec...

A sermon for Maundy Thursday. Exodus 12.1-14 ; John 13.1-17,31b-35 “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”. Tonight we gather to remember the Passover – the time when God freed his people from slavery in Egypt and led them to freedom in the Promised Land. Tonight we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, given to his disciples at the last supper he shared with them before his death. Tonight we gather to begin our journey through the three days of the Passion of our Lord, his death and resurrection. Tonight we gather to do all these things. But above all these things, tonight we gather to take our shoes off and then to put them on again. So let me ask you now to take off your shoes. Shoes off and shoes on – that is what tonight is all about. Shoes off – shoes on. We find it in the Gospel reading. It is an insight into the very being and nature of God. It is our calling as disciples of Jesus. Shoes off. Shoes on. So let me expla...

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...