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Who am I?
I had a burning bush moment this week, watching my favourite TV show. In the scene, one of the characters has been ‘outed’ as gay, as a result of intimate photos being leaked. A journalist confronts him and asks ‘who are you?’. He responds: “Who am I? Do you mean where I’m from? What I…
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Review: The Covid Pandemic and the World’s Religions edited by George D. Chryssides and Dan Cohn-Sherbok
This book brings together 30 contributors, representing 14 religions, each writing about the pandemic and their faith. Each writer received the same questions as prompts: how their faith explained why the pandemic occurred, how it had changed their practice and what we had learned from it. Their answers are presented in full and without commentary,…
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Review: Lower than the Angels by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch offers a calm and thorough history of sex and Christianity in this compendium.
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Review: On Voice. Speech, Song, Silence: Human and Divine
The array of topics covered range from the sad tale of eunuchs to the mysterious voices of bird and whale song, and a fascinating reflection on how the timeless synthesised voice of Stephen Hawkings defied his debilitated body and captured his youthfulness.
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Review: Vile Bodies. The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith and Practice.
Before reading Vile Bodies, I had no idea how alien the ancient understanding of bodies and sex were to ours. These ancient understandings seem risible to us now – and I did laugh many times reading this book – but the consequences of them are no laughing matter.
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Review: Passions of the soul
Williams introduces the book as ‘non-scholarly’, though the introduction was dated ‘Michaelmas 2022’, using the esoteric Oxford calendar. I’m not a scholar and I had to read this book without distraction and often multiple times. I suppose I was forced into a monastic experience of reading.