Category: Podcast

Book reviews for Christmas

I suppose you can get people presents that are other-than-books.

But why would you?

Justin Brierley: The surprising rebirth of belief in God

Justin Brierley is as good as anyone observing the fickle winds of fashion in thought.

For many years he hosted the podcast Unbelievable which moderated match-ups between atheists and Christians. Moderated is the right word, since Brierley kept the peace and ensured, most times, the conversations were fruitful. You can’t help thinking that if the BBC had the sense to match their reach, they would have headhunted him years ago, a brilliant natural broadcaster with unshowy erudition. Still.

This book takes us through some of what he’s learnt from his ringside seat watching thought-leaders’ wrestle. Mostly it’s a careful account of the disintegration of New Atheist teaching, and some notes on what’s replacing it. He finds a new respect for theism; a renewed respect for the Bible; and some of the people he’s met has, to their surprise, either become committed Christians or thoughtful and sympathetic observers of the Christian faith. It’s a fascinating contemporary summary, leveraging his superpower of finding influential thinkers and inviting them onto his show.

If you, like me, wander into bookshops and have been occasionally surprised by finding sympathy for the Christian faith in unexpected places, this book gives a comprehensive and better researched summary of the shifting weather. It’s super and (for the Christian) heartening.

Justin Brierley offers three exhortations to the church near the end of the book – three things to cling tightly to:
1. Faith and reason
2. The mystery – the Christian faith quickly wanders into a dark woodland of paradox, the beyond-understanding, the ancient, the gnarly, all accompanied by the sound of worship (‘Church bells beyond the stars heard’ George Herbert wrote). Some of those turning to the faith enjoy all this, much more than they do Christian pseudo-rock concerts, or people ‘being discipled’ through a short course of study.
3. A forgiving, accepting community, a powerful force, now that social media has made witch-burning popular again in the outside world.

Super book for anyone wanting to keep up. Grab a copy.

Bananas for free!

Hello you,

Your book is wonderful! I do hope that it is very widely read.

|Prof. Sir Colin Humphreys CBE FRS, Cambridge University

A slightly out-0f-time blog entry with the happy news that my book More than Bananas is now free again on Amazon. So you can read it on your Kindle, or (as I do) on your phone with a Kindle app.

The joy of free books is that people can sample my stuff and then if they wish, part with coinage for the next titles in the series. It was free on Kindle a while ago, and became a worldwide theology bestseller, which helped me feel good if nothing else. So I’m so glad it’s back, with the great joy of anyone being able to help themselves to it for nothing.

Audio fans can listen to my reading of the book as a set of podcasts.

Please enjoy and tell your friends.

A little pause

Very much enjoyed a recent podcast from Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable series (Here on spotify but available via all the podcast hosters). It featured writer Paul Kingsnorth and Rowan Williams. Dr Williams’ theological musings have freedom to take wing now that he has been released from being Archbishop of Canterbury. Seeing him in his natural habitat (books, ideas and God) you feel perhaps he was never quite suited to the Archbishopy world of soundbite and confrontation and politics and business plans.

Paul Kingsnorth’s story was of a long reluctant progress to Christian faith via environmental activism, Buddhism and Wicca. He was eloquent in describing his journey to Christ, which despite its unlikely stopping places seemed to him more to do with continuity than discontinuity, though of course it had elements of both. He eventually realized he was searching for God and eventually Christ found him, via the Eastern Orthodox tradition as lived out by religious Romanians in Ireland.

Rowan Williams, meantime, was busy colouring everything in with his own reflections on conversion and Orthodoxy, and was, as ever, capable of giving us plinkety-plonk evangelicals a taste for the symphonic. His Christian faith, he said, expanded his view rather than contracting it. I liked that. He told us how you can’t just ‘put God over there and examine him’, which, frankly, is a bit of an evangelical pastime. And he talked about God creating creation like a pianist creates a sonata, or perhaps like a stream being created by the flowing water within it, a ceaseless creation, enabled moment-by-moment by an unsummarizable God.

Next time you’re on a long car journey, as we were, I’d recommend a listen.

And a shout-out to Justin Brierley whose Unbelievable podcast, a model of how to listen to the other guy, still shines after ten or more yours, and where this appeared. Broadcasting at its best IMHO.

Time, our missed perspective

This is at the heart of slow. I have been in a conference this week where one of the speakers reminded us about God answering prayers ‘immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine’1.

There’s a scale here and an extent that stretches out beyond the limits of our imagination and does so because of the compounding effects of time.

It is impossible that the Apostle Paul, writing those words to a group of Turkish and Greek churches in the first century could believe what was going to happen. Twenty centuries later, the world is more complex than Paul could have guessed, but as earth turns, the sun never lights up a moment there when thousands, probably millions, are not reading Paul.

Would John Milton know that five centuries after his passing, someone, me, would be listening to Paradise Lost on a thing called a phone via a thing called a podcast while travelling at speed in a car?

What will Time and God do with the little things we offer him?