Available Light

There’s a particularly worrying phone call which most of us will one day receive: “Hello, this is your doctor. There’s nothing to worry about, but could you come and see me first thing tomorrow morning?” I have had four such phone calls in the past decade, the last one, strangely, on the day after I began reading Myk Habet’s book. Each of these conversations has driven me to revisit what I think will happen on that day when I finally step out of three dimensional reality. I believe that whatever lies over the horizon for me will be characterised by the most complete picture of reality we are ever going to get, namely the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a child emerging from the womb into the real world, I will, sooner rather than later, emerge from this current reality into one that is infinitely bigger than I can imagine but I generally try to set aside guesswork about what that might be like.  Catching me when he did, however, Myk Habets enco...

I'd read only one of John Shelby Spong's books before I read this one. Back in the day I'd found  his Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism , by turns helpful, illuminating and infuriating. Helpful and illuminating because it articulated many of my own opinions about the Bible, and infuriating because the scholarship was at times careless and because Spong's own claims for his opinions and for himself were not as unarguable as he pretended they were.  I've had a pretty similar reaction to this book. Unbelievable is 319 pages long including footnotes and index, and is printed on odd, lightweight paper by Harper Collins. It was published this year. Central to this book is the observation -pretty obvious and incontrovertible, really - that an experience and the description of that experience are two different things. Experiences can sometimes be universal, that is, they have a constancy over time and space, but the explanation given to the experience is cultur...

Last week I received my copy of David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament. The first of his books that I ever read was Atheist Delusions , which I found so entertaining and helpful, that in fairly short order I bought and read The Beauty of the Infinite , In the Aftermath and The Doors of the Sea . For a while now I have been reading The Experience of God . Hart is not always easy to read, not because he writes badly, but because he writes well. His arguments are strong, clear, concisely and cogently reasoned but are often complex. He is enormously erudite and has a bigger vocabulary than anyone I have read for a long time.  Other writers, of course, know lots of big words, especially academics, who speak to each other in that siloed, obtuse, opaque  dialect particular to universities, but David Bentley Hart, while not lacking in academic street cred, isn't like that. When I read his books I always have a dictionary to hand, as about every second page there w...

To thank me for  for preaching at her installation as Dean of Christchurch, Lynda Patterson gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami's  2010 novel 1Q84 , one of the best works of fiction I've ever read. It was like nothing I had ever encountered in its smooth blending of surreal elements, its inventive scope and its array of quirky but believable characters. Yesterday I finished another of Murakami's books, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and found it equally challenging and satisfying. At a little over 600 pages it was written in 1994-5 and translated from into English in 1997 by Jay Rubin. Murukami's influences are, partially at least, Western, and although the "feel" of the book seems decidedly Japanese to me, he is sometimes criticised in his homeland as being un-Japanese. This is in some measure because the works of most of his compatriots place strong emphasis on family and connection while his books are filled with solitary people, and loneliness is one of h...

The sheer size and scope of Iain McGilchrist's 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World make it a challenging read. The general path for academics is to write more and more about less and less, but McGilchrist's 534 pages range over a vast smorgasbord of subject matter including, amongst others,  brain science, philosophy, linguistics, the development of language, art history, sociology and history. The challenge is one that it is rewarding to accept because despite the volume of material presented the book is clearly and accessibly written and his central thesis is intriguing. This is a book which explains so much; which puts so much into perspective.  I read this with yellow highlighter in hand as every chapter, and sometimes every page contained learnings I wished to return to. In terms of my own understanding this is probably the most influential book I've read in the last decade. McGilchrist's theory begins...

Last week, about a year after I had ordered it, my copy of Bibliotheca arrived. Bibliotheca is an edition of the Bible produced by Adam Lewis Greene. He aimed to restore a way of encountering the Biblical text which we have lost as our approach to the scripture has become more encyclopaedic and more cerebral. So here is a beautifully produced piece of the bookmaker's art, printed on fine paper and in a clear, attractive font, with a sewn binding and cloth covers so that it opens flat. It is printed in four volumes, with one extra containing the Apocrypha, each volume being 400-500 pages, and each about the size and weight of  a hardback novel. There are no chapter of verse numbers, and no textual apparatus of any kind; there is just the text, beautifully bound and printed on paper which is as lovely to touch as the firm covers. I am already part way through a reading of the whole Bible, so immediately swapped to Bibliotheca and unwittingly and gently brought myself face t...

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Wndow and Disappeared. by Jonas Jonasson This 2010 novel is hard to categorise: comedy? historical novel? farce? All of the above? The complex plot meanders, Forest Gump style, through the history of the 20th Century. It's very funny in parts, but is either not spectacularly well written, or not well translated from the original Swedish, or both. The complicated and inventive plot kept me persevering far past the point where the literary critic in me was screaming give up now, there are a dozen far better things waiting for you on your to be read shelf . It has been made into a variably reviewed Swedish movie, and is crying out for Hollywood to take notice. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children/ Hollow City / Library of Souls. by Ransom Riggs. I saw the movie Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children on a plane a few weeks back, and on the strength of that bought the boxed set of 3 novels by Ransom Riggs.  The m...

Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close   is one that I found compelling - I read it in a couple of days - but somehow, not particularly enjoyable. The premise is intriguing: the book tells the story of a nine year old boy, Oskar Schell, whose father was killed in the 9/11 attack. Oskar finds a key in a vase belonging to his father, and feels compelled to discover the key's origins and purpose. From a note left inside the vase Oskar concludes that the owner of the key is named Black, and sets out to visit everybody in New York with that surname. The book is thus a kind of journey story, and is filled with a range of eccentric characters, but there was some thing about it which I did not find engaging. The novel is told in the first person, but Foer contrives, by introducing two separate series of letters,  to shift the narrator from Oskar to his grandfather (writing to Oskar's father) and his grandmother (writing to Oskar himself). The let...

Every so often a book comes along at just the right time, and this little work by Chester Brown is one of them, though, in this case, it's not for the reasons books are usually helpful. Let me say at the outset that while I admire this book, and found it intriguing, I do not agree with it's fundamental premise. I saw this on a colleague's bookshelf and got myself a copy. It's a beautifully produced little thing; wonderfully laid out with a high quality binding and lovely paper it's one of those books which gives aesthetic pleasure just from handling it. The book itself is composed of a brief graphic novel and end notes, but that isn't really accurate. The graphic novel is actually a series of short renditions of various Biblical narratives, each self contained, but contributing to a greater narrative structure, which is Brown's particular interpretation of the genealogy of Jesus presented in Matthew's Gospel. The drawing is beautiful, and the small ...

I was pointed to this remarkable book by someone who knows the geography of my soul pretty well. This, the last of Henri Nouwen's many books is a series of excerpts from a journal he kept during a painful and difficult time in his life. After a career as a world renowned scholar and spiritual writer, in 1987 Nouwen became the pastor of L'Arche, a community for people with intellectual impairment in Toronto. Soon after moving there, an important relationship led him to a place of profound spiritual growth, but also  through a period in which he lost his sense of self worth, his sense of  being loved and even his faith in God. This period of deep growth and anguish gave rise to one of his most highly regarded books, The Return of The Prodigal Son , but he regarded his journal as too raw, too personal for public consumption. Near the end of his life he was persuaded to allow the wisdom from this period to be shared, and I am glad he was courageous enough to do so. The Inner ...

The Rev'd Professor Sarah Coakley's first volume of  her projected four volume systematic theology is not overly huge, at 388 pages, but it took me a while to read. Professor Coakley's style is accessible, and she uses an intriguingly eclectic range of sources to make her case, but I couldn't rush it: she faced me with such new and such big ideas in every chapter. Recognising that the idea of a systematic theology is itself problematic, particularly to many feminists, in that it seeks to impose reductionist, prescribed system on our conception of the divine, she has set out to construct a Theologie Totale , a drawing together of a number of sources to recast theology not so much within the strictures of rationality but within the surrender which is the basis of her own contemplative practice. She is academically and Biblically rigorous, but manages to talk to a wider audience than the academy.  The book is an extended essay on the Trinity, which she explores from a ...