The Theos team give their reading recommendations for Christmas:
Elizabeth Oldfield, Director, recommends:
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
If you're buying a present for a fan of literary fiction I would heartily recommend Gilead by this year's Theos Annual Lecturer Marilynne Robinson. It is perhaps the most beautiful novel I have ever read. It is particularly suitable for your sceptical loved ones, as it has prompted many a hardened atheist to enter an imaginative world of Christianity that they find serious, compelling and haunting. Just read the amazon reviews. Her collections of non-fiction writing are also very good.
Nick Spencer, Research Director, recommends:
Drysalter – Michael Simmons Roberts (Cape, 2013)
Charles Darwin lost the ability to read poetry so immersed was he in dry prose. I was slipping the same way until I read Michael Simmons Robert’s Corpus a few years ago. Drysalter is more ambitious and no less successful than the earlier volume. 150 ‘super sonnets’ - 15 line poems of varying structure - play with the themes and tones of the Psalter. Biblical image and phrase are earthed in familiar world made strange. MSR is a poet of detail – like Heaney he is good as “seeing things”, a poet for whom the physical and the material are spiritual. Drysalter is like stained glass – translucent and yet transforming.
Paul Bickley, Director of political programmes, recommends:
Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation - James K. A. Smith
Desiring the Kingdom is the first part of three volume series on what the author calls ‘cultural liturgies’. The core argument is simple: we are not primarily thinking but feeling animals – yet Christians treat education and formation as a matter of the head and not the heart, of ideas rather than love. Not only is this bad anthropology, but it also leaves us vulnerable to a culture is littered with ‘liturgies’ into which we are constantly being conscripted, and which orient our desires towards alternative kingdoms. Smith cites William Cavanaugh’s vivid question: “How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world to kill people he knows nothing about?”
The book could be seen as a expressing in theological terms what books like David Brooks' The Social Animal offered in the grammar of anthropology and beahvioural psychology. But really, it’s a return to an basic Augustinian view of what it is to be a human being: "our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee". Smith (a philosopher) doesn't disdain the mind, ideas or reason, but he does try to put them in their proper place.
The second part of the trilogy (Imagining the Kingdom) was published earlier this year, and James KA Smith will be speaking at a Theos event on 16 January 2014.
Ben Ryan, Research intern, recommends:
Evangelii Gaudium - Pope Francis
I’m going to take Justin Welby’s warnings to heart and propose a read that won’t even send you any further into debt! Freely available online is Pope Francis’s new exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. Try to ignore the surrounding sensationalist headlines on economic theories and read what the message actually says.
It is a really moving document that expresses on the page what Francis has already exemplified in his actions. It is a manifesto for a Church that cares and expresses its care in all its words and deeds. There is a striking and consistent use of the first person at many key junctures which takes the words out of a purely intellectual context (though note that Aquinas and Augustine are still quoted, it’s not anti-intellectual either) into a personal and emotional plea. It calls for all Christians to embrace their personal faith and take action.
Image from flickr.com by Juhan Sonin under the Creative Commons Licence.
