Have you ever had the experience of reading something you’d written a long time ago and being surprised to meet yourself again? It might be a letter you wrote to your grandmother that she kept and then returned to you (grandmothers do these things), or a diary you scribbled in as a teenager that your mother dragged out of the shoebox in the storeroom, or an impassioned essay you wrote at Uni which you discover as you’re cleaning out the filing cabinet.
Category Archives: Book Review
Talking about Total Church (Part 2)
Review, Sola Panel
Living with the Underworld
I like to think of the city of Melbourne as being a nice place to live—more predictable and safer than its cousin Sydney, full of cul-de-sacs, footy carnivals, Neighbours and cappuccinos. But apparently it too has a dark underbelly—a monstrous flipside peopled by drug dealers, crime gangs and hit men engaged in a bitter, deadly war. It turns out this other Melbourne was there all along—imperceptible to its more decent citizens until it was shockingly revealed. (more…)
Review: “The Old Evangelicalism”
Review
The Old Evangelicalism: Old truths for a new awakening
Iain H Murray
Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 2005, 226pp.
Recent debates in my circles (about the nature of the Trinity, and about who is suitable to be ordained or to preside at the Lord’s Supper) show an uneasy footing with regard to theologians of the past. Sometimes we are keen to legitimate our standing in the apostolic tradition, and so we selectively cite those earlier divines who shared our opinions. Sometimes we confer on some past thinker a godlike authority, and then proceed to marry our thoughts precisely to theirs. Sometimes we are so convinced of an historically eccentric view, we ignore all our forebears, rebuffing them with a cry of “Sola scriptura!” (more…)
Trusting out loud: three books on prayer
The Message of Prayer
Numbers: Homeward Bound
Review
The Dawkins challenge
Review
Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church
Review
Do-it-yourself morality
Review
Taking the offensive (message)
Review
Questioning Evangelism
Review
The Twilight of Atheism
Review
The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World
Alister McGrath
Rider Books, London, 2004, 306pp.
Did Christianity really decline?
Review
The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding secularization 1800–2000
Callum G. Brown
Routledge, London and New York, 2001, 256pp.
It’s an ironic title, is it not? After all, Britain is still, obviously, a place where a mainstream publisher will take on a book which is entirely about the social significance of Christianity and which argues against the assumptions of secularist theory. Moreover, the first chapter, which describes “the Christian churches in crisis”, quotes,