Drawn from the author’s low-key research, fascinating study of how people do and don’t identify with various characters in biblical stories and how cultural background seems to affect our reading and understanding. Then some work on how clergy and laity identify with characters and understand meanings of stories. Food for thought and a real help to think about how preaching and Christian education are carried through.

Definitely a must have scifi book. It’s the kind I would give to friends who remain to be convinced of the ‘worthiness’ of science fiction. It explores important issues in a helpful way. It is sympathetic to religious views and to non-religious.

My only negative crit is that it seemed to run out of steam a little towards the end, but that’s a fairly minor point.

The research this book is based on worked with British ‘included’ teenagers and twenty-somethings; the generation Y of the book title. It analyses the results and then connects this analysis with wider cultural trends and their implications for Christian youth work and mission. The important thing is that the assumption that religion is out and spirituality is in is wrong. There is not much sign of a deinstitutionalised spiritual quest among the people interviewed.

There are some important things to note from this study. These are included youngsters who have sufficient income and apparent family stability not to disturb overmuch the happy midi-narrative that the study identifies as their metanarrative-substitute. Therefore, for a fuller picture we should note that there are people in this age group for whom the ideology does not work. Indeed, because of the group construction and maintenance of this midi-narrative it may be that there are private doubts and struggles which are not permissable to articulate and which are repressed.

One of the commendations of the book is that we engage in prior mission. That is creating space for the asking of big questions and exploration as well a the telling of Christian stories and the demonstrating of how Christianity can look when it takes seriously the values of the Reign of God.

Engagement with the happy midi-ers will mean taking a positive approach to the celebration of the present world, multi-layering our worship and communication, living with ambiguity in order to be in on important conversations, casting off hierarchical assumptions. At a number of points I felt that a life coaching approach was essentially being recommended, without that label. It would be useful to be aware and constructively engage in the identity construction projects of generation Y. We also have to take seriously the way that consumerism is now the principle way of approaching life. I suspect that in many ways this is the meta-narrative, in fact into which the happy midi-narrative fits. We also have to take seriously that these are what I have termed digiborgines.

There was some support for the hypothesis that I have sometimes put forward that culturally the background religious ideas, the folk religion, so to speak, is now more new Agey than Christian.

Altogether a thought-provoking read that is important for Christian leaders and youth workers to have in mind as they work with mission and pastoral relationships with generation Y. There will be much to helyp put sundry observations into perspective and to suggest avenues for further exploration in mission.

Set in a very informative historical context of the developments of English church organisation, this book advocates very convincingly a minster church model of church organisation, pastoral care and mission.

This is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. I hope to write a fuller review later, but couldn’t just leave this as ‘worth consuming’!

I liked the characters, I liked the storyline, I loved the issues it dealt with and I felt there was a good human and even theological angle running through it. I wanted to know what would happen with the next mission. As a linguist I also liked the linguistic elements and wanted to know more, reallye

If I have a criticism, it is the phonetics of the aliens; too little attention given to the way that a different sort of mouth would be able to produce sound, I suspect. But that’s a minor fault in a good piece of writing.

I got this by swapping a copy of my Praying the Pattern for it. Scot McKnight, the author blogs at Jesuscreed. I thought it would be interesting as a swap because both deal with regular patterned praying and encouraging it.

Scot’s book is the kind of thing that I would give or commend to a no-longer new Christian who is seeking to develop their devotional life and perhaps been finding that the normal, usually evangelical protestant, ways need suping up or changing. It’s written in an accessible way and deals with some of the typical objections or hang-ups that prots have about using office-prayers. Clearly he is influenced by Phyllis Tickle (who wrote the preface) and her books of hours (e.g.). He uses some nice analogies to help make his points, notably the idea of personal prayer being within the larger structure of the church’s prayer. He introduces the main streams of office-style devotion with helpful sharing of his own first impressions and how he and his wife found their way in to using them.

If I have a downside to comment on, it’s to do with my own Lord’s prayer perspective. So, if Scot reads the copy I swapped with him, he may think about the distinction between cathedral and monastic offices a bit more, as this was not really dealt with and he tends to focus on the monastic strands. I’d be interested, too, to know what he makes of the idea that perhaps, if early Christians had been so caught up with polemical attitudes towards Judaism, they might have developed office-praying structured around the Lord’s prayer rather than simply reciting it verbatim.

There is some crossover between our books in terms of arguments commending office-praying and dealing with practicalities.

So, worth getting if you are thinking about starting office praying or wanting to encourage someone else to.

I have to confess that I had a particular set of interests in reading this, and so I did skim some parts that were less relevant to those interests. The book goes over theories of the self, personhood and identity. Much of the book is taken up with examining and discarding many of the inherited philosophical approaches: dualisms Cartesian, Thomistic, and materialistic accounts. The view that ‘emerges’ is that what the author terms ‘emorgent dualism’ probably works best. There is a helpful discussion, too, of the forms of emergence. He ends with a discussion of the prospects for post-mortem existence from an emergent dualist point of view -which is actually compatible with an orthodox Christian account. Very helpful.

I found the analogy of an electro magnet helpful: the current goes on and a magnetic field is generated; an emergent property which is for the purposes of this discussion an analogue of the person /soul /identity.

I found it helpful in showing the way that an emergent approach can be related to a modified Aristotelian/Thomist approach, which had been my intuition. It was also good to see the emergent account come out as the most explanatory account and as philosophically coherant.

I’m reviewed this for ‘Anvil’, but I’m interested in any case by the issues of religion and living in a plural world. I am an a priori skeptic of the kind of approach that this book advocates, so it should be a thought-provocative read.

Here’s my 600 word review.

The subtitle is “A Multifaith Exploration” and the phrase works on two levels as a description of the book: it explores theological responses to the fact of a multifaith global context and it includes contributions from people of several different faith backgrounds. It will be no surprise that the broad aim of the book is to articulate a pluralist approach to interfaith relations. The title focuses on the idea of religious superiority, that any one religion is superior to another, and tries to explore the proposal that such a view is a myth; a necessary story for the adherents of the a religion but not one to be taken to exclude and downgrade or disrespect others. In fact the aim is to encourage the various religions to develop ways of thinking about other faiths, using their own faith resources, that gives them parity of esteem with ones own. The reason given for this is approach is that without such parity, there is an inherent rivalry which is conflictual and therefore ill-suited to the harmonious development of world history.

Of necessity, the multiplicity of voices means that there is no one smooth argument. In fact I came away thinking that quite a number of contributions were actually arguing for a generous variety of inclusivism rather than pluralism. It seemed to me that most contributers were unable to resolve the inherent conflict between thorough-going pluralism and holding ones own tradition in some way valuable, and so a form of inclusivism was the only recourse and I felt that Reinhold Bernhardt’s essay probably showed that most clearly. I remained unconvinced by the arguments for pluralism and felt on balance that the attempted arguments for it from an orthodox Christian position failed. It seems that, although there are themes in Christian theology that can be pressed into a more inclusivist mould, the thorough-going pluralism advocated by the editor seems to be too big a stretch.

Given that the strongest argument for pluralism seems to be that it is the easiest position from which to accord genuine respect for religious difference, I would judge that those of us who continue to be unconvinced by pluralism have to respond to the challenge to do non-pluralist theology in such a way as to give honour where honour is due and to lay foundations for genuinely respectful learning from the religiously other and to disinherit the arguments for disrespect and even violent responses.

One of the strange omissions for me, except for one mention, was Barth. I found the constant acceptance of ‘religion’ as straightforwardly salvific in some way problematic and longed to see a fuller engagement with more evangelical approaches seeing all religious endeavour including Christian as fraught with fallen tendencies and traps for the unwary; so if we have a hard time affirming Christian religion, how can we unconcernedly affirm others’?

There is much in this book that bears further thought and wrestling with and as a set of statements advocating a pluralist position in response to the critiques of its first blush it is important. In the end it seems to me that Bernhardt should have the last word; “the religions will never totally move beyond a ‘Ptolomaic’ framework; they will have to engage each other in a never-ending dialogue … inclusive insofar as it starts on the side of ones own religion; ... mutual since it will open one’s own tradition to the challenging otherness of other religions.”

This is an interesting novel. Not an easy read as it immerses the reader, at times in unpleasant realities that are presented as growing out of a materialistic world view. And it is ultimately gloomy. It answers the question “Is this all there is: breeding [or not] and dying” with a yes and the only hope is that science can help us to evolve out of our worst traits.

I liked the interplay of scientific progress and cultural effects, particularly the way that New Age ideas and popular culture have been processing the view of the universe that a materialistic take on science can bring about. The metaphor of elementary particles for human society is worth thinking about.