Reviews Articles
Disarming the argument
Tim Wallis says of his book, The Truth About Trident: Disarming the Nuclear Argument, that in one sense the book took three months to write, but in another sense it took thirty years. How so? It draws indirectly on his lifetime in peace work.
Blood and earth: modern slavery
Kevin Bales is co-founder of Free the Slaves, consultant to the UN Global Program against Trafficking of Human Beings and author of a widely praised book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Don’t talk about how the big people eat at the big table These words, spoken...
Petals and bullets
The book Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris - New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War by Mark Derby is a well-written and absorbing story. It is based mainly on eighty personal and evocative letters written by Dorothy Morris to her family in New Zealand between 1937 and 1946. In these years...
Treasure beneath the hearth
The Quaker approach to the Christian scriptures is a radical one, not well understood either among Friends, nor the wider Christian community. George Fox and Robert Barclay were always clear that they valued not so much the words of scripture, as the Spirit, the source from which those words sprang ...
What the mystics knew
Richard Rohr is a seventy-three-year-old American Franciscan. He has been writing about spirituality for a long time, and it’s beginning to show. He seems to have something like an ageing writer’s version of in vino veritas, which may be interpreted thus: ‘Damn it all! I’m going to...
Austerity
Mark Blyth has written a clever, well-argued book that we should all read. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea analyses the economic theory that wages and prices should be reduced, as part of budget cuts, in order to return an economy to a successful competitive state.
Spiritual activism: leadership as service
‘Activism is all about putting our highest values into practice in the world. Spirituality involves an awareness of where those values come from… our motives, passions and drives.’ This is the crux of the message of Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service by Alastair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael. It is a...
A life in science
The second volume of Richard Dawkins’ autobiography is entitled Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science and is more interesting than the first. As Dawkins has engaged in a herculean contest with religion, now, near the end of his life, one would expect his view of it to...
How good can we be
This book is a rant. But what a rant! It is unputdownable. This is extraordinary for a piece of non-fiction, much as was Will Hutton’s The State We’re In, written twenty years ago. How Good We Can Be: Ending the Mercenary Society and Building a Great Country reads...
James and the Jerusalem Church
If you enjoy ‘whodunnits?’ and jigsaw puzzles, the chances are you will enjoy this radical exploration of Christian origins. Alan Saxby, in James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church, has examined in detail the situation in Judaism during the lifetime of Jesus, and the following seventy years. He follows...