Abstract
Charles Williams,
The Celian Moment and Other Essays
, edited by Stephen Barber (Carterton, Oxfordshire: Greystones Press, 2017); 127 pp.: 9781911122111, £12.99 (pbk)
Stephen Barber, treasurer of the now defunct Charles Williams Society, has gathered together ten of the poet Charles Williams’s critical essays on a variety of topics – including Dante, Shakespeare’s Henry V, Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Duchess of Malfi and Eliot’s Four Quartets – edited them somewhat (especially supplying sources for Williams’s numerous, but unreferenced, literary quotations) and provided a helpful introduction. This is not really an introduction to Williams’s somewhat elliptical writings but more a collection for his fans. Rowan Williams aptly depicts his namesake’s writings as ‘chaotic, sometimes pretentious, sometimes waffly, sometimes unbearably clotted, and yet in the middle of it, there are so many gems’.
John Swinton and Harriet Mowat,
Practical Theology and Qualitative Research
, 2nd edition (London: SCM Press, 2016); 301 pp.: 9780334049883, £25.00 (pbk)
Originally published ten years ago, the new edition of this useful, practical book has added a new chapter and appendix bringing it up to date in terms of the literature published, and networks developed, since the first edition. Since many practical/applied theology students use qualitative rather than quantitative methods in their empirical research, this book by two practical theologians at Aberdeen University has already proved its worth.
Michael J. Gorman,
Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and his Letters
, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017); 707 pp.: 9780802874283, $48.00 (pbk)
This book is also the second edition of a well-established book (first published in 2004). The author has made changes to every chapter, made it clearer that the title does not amount to a denial of the resurrection and added a new section on ‘cruciformity in terms of participation in the life and mission of God’. Tom Wright commends this new edition as ‘a book to draw in the beginner and to compel the expert into fresh reflection’.
Michael W. Goheen,
Reading the Bible Missionally
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016); 343 pp.: 9780802872258, $34.00 (pbk)
A wide-ranging collection of 15 essays with some well-known contributors, including Richard Bauckham and Tom Wright. It is organized into five sections: A Missional Hermeneutic; A Missional Reading of the OT; A Missional Reading of the NT; A Missional Reading of Scripture and Preaching; and A Missional Reading of Scripture and Theological Education. The editors acknowledge at the outset that ‘missional’ is a recent neologism but defend it as a ‘helpful scaffolding’. Unfortunately, my computer’s automatic spell-check has yet to catch up …
Peter Feldmeier,
The Christian Tradition: A Historical and Theological Introduction
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); 374 pp.: 9780199374380, £38.99/$59.95 (pbk)
This very nicely produced and illustrated (albeit in black and white) introduction looks ideal for teaching, but even as a paperback it is quite expensive for overdrawn student pockets. Twenty-one chapters start with the Old Testament and finish with worldwide modern Christianity, each divided into clear subsections and each with a conclusion. There is also a useful glossary of key terms (that does not include ‘missional’).
Michael Peterson (ed.),
The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings
, 2nd edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017); 607 pp.: 9780268038472, $35.00 (pbk); 9780268100322, $125.00 (hbk)
The second edition of this seminal reader has been expanded from 391 pages in the original 1991 edition to 607 today. Compared with other current readers in this area, Peterson’s offers one of the best ways of getting an overall critical understanding of the philosophical problem of evil (or better, the philosophical problem of unwarranted suffering). It covers, for example, some of the same ground as Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams’s The Problem of Evil (OUP, 1990), but it is much fuller and more up-to-date. It is also very good value as a paperback. The blurb accurately claims that it is ‘an essential guide to the field’. Only the first 60 pages are devoted to historical accounts. With one exception (Augustine), the next 26 contributions are modern and give an excellent overview of the arguments from atheists such as J. L. Mackie to believers such as John Hick and the more conservative, but wonderfully clever, Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga. Peterson himself offers a judicious critical summary both in his Introduction and in a helpful mediating essay. A book to cherish.
Gordon Leah,
There Your Heart Will Be: Essays in Faith and Literature
(Bracknell, Berks: Newbold Academic Press, 2017); 240 pp.: 9780993218880, £14.50 (pbk)
In this collection of 15 essays the Methodist lay-preacher and retired A-Level German teacher Dr Gordon Leah reflects upon the way that novels can throw light upon faith. Assiduous readers of Theology will recall his two recent contributions to Theology (May 2015 and July 2016). The first of these is republished here. All the other essays have been published over the last 14 years in various theological journals, especially in the Methodist Epworth Review and the Catholic Heythrop Journal, and the book itself is published by an Adventist college press – admirably ecumenical. Movingly, he combines brief accounts of a period in the 1990s when he lost faith, together with examples of how novels helped him slowly to come to a more nuanced Christian faith.