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RESOURCES INDEX |
| Book Reviews
Summer 2010 Jesus and
the Gospel Women In Jesus and the Gospel Women, Joanna Collicutt McGrath has written an engaging exploration of Jesus’ relationships with women which makes excellent and encouraging reading. Her core message is that these Gospel relationships reveal good news for women. Jesus’ way of relating assures women ‘you are not on your own’ and ‘things don’t have to be this way’ but also challenges us to ‘get up and grow up’. Jesus’ words to the girl in Mark 5.41 “Talitha Cum!”, “Little girl, get up!” apply to us too – we are all called to be raised by Christ not only to a new life but also to a new and empowered sense of self. The first chapter explores with great imagination the similarities between the archetypal romantic hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy, and Jesus. Both have heroic attributes: they assure us we are not alone and they promise that things can change. But a romantic hero such as Mr Darcy is also expected to sweep us off our feet and wipe away life’s difficulties at a stroke. Collicutt McGrath cautions us against receiving Jesus in this way. Jesus’ interactions with the Gospel women are ‘negotiated two-way transactions’. Jesus’ message is ‘Get up, I need you to…’ Jesus invites us to a relationship of active engagement rather than one of passive acceptance. Later chapters flesh out the thesis in detail and it is very useful to have the author’s own translations to bring fresh insights to the biblical texts. I particularly valued the discussion in the final chapter which focuses on the experiences of the women at the empty tomb who were entrusted by God to be apostles of the Resurrection but were belittled and ignored by their co-disciples. Collicutt McGrath invites contemporary Christian women to re-appropriate the experience of those first female followers of Jesus. ‘Where your brethren forget how things were with Jesus – remind them; where your brethren try to silence you or denigrate your message – speak out with courage; above all keep telling your story.’ Despite being a slim paperback, this book is a rich read and would provide a very good focus for a series of group discussions. I would have valued a chapter exploring what it means in psychological terms for women to have a hero that is male – albeit one who empowers the women he meets. And I confess, I am left secretly craving a heroine! But Collicutt McGrath cannot be held responsible for that. She has produced a lively and thought provoking book that I would highly recommend. Rachel Weir is CHAIR of WATCH and an NSM of Headington Quarry in Oxford Diocese. back to top Christ
and Culture Worship-Shaped Life These two books form the first volumes in a new series, Canterbury Studies in Anglicanism, which aims to open up discussions in the worldwide Church, such as at the recent Lambeth Conf-erence, to a wider audience. The first, Christ and Culture, is a rather misleading title. It is in fact a collection of reflections on the role and responsibilities of a bishop in the Anglican Church. As the editors describe it in their preface, ‘the writers of these Lambeth Essays were invited to extend the work of the Lambeth Conference 2008: to take the themes of the Conference into every corner of the Anglican Communion and to make the themes accessible for grassroots conversation and reflection. So, we have theological reflections from a few of the Anglican scholars and leaders who attended the 2008 conference’. These include two essays on aspects of ‘The Bishop and Anglican Identity’; three on ‘The Bishop, Other Churches, and God’s Mission’; three on ‘Engaging with a Multi-Faith World’; two looking at aspects of mission and one on ‘The Bishop and Social Justice’. Disappointingly, these are entirely male voices (though to their credit the editors seem to have been uncomfortably aware of this, and have commissioned Katherine Jefferts-Schori to provide a Foreword). Furthermore, in the index of names referenced in the text, only two women appear. Women as bishops are mentioned only once, in a footnote, in the context of being a problematic issue in Anglican-Roman Catholic relations. It would be wonderful to think that this lack of discussion of the issue of women bishops reflected a widespread assumption that it was a non-issue. In fact, it is clear that the ‘elephant in the room’ at the 2008 Lambeth Conference was gay bishops rather than women bishops: both are rarely if ever directly referred to in this book, though clearly these tensions underlie some of the repeated appeals by many of the contributors to the importance of the bishop as a ‘focus of unity’. I found this to be a strangely unsatisfying book to read. It is of course a good thing for these discussion papers which were presented at the Lambeth Conference, and reflections on the proceedings, to be made available to a wider audience. Publication serves the interests of transparency, and enables us to eavesdrop on some of the Lambeth discussions. But eavesdropping is what reading this book feels like: it is mainly a conversation for bishops and among bishops, to which we are invited to listen, but not to participate. The best part of the book for me were the three essays entitled ‘Engaging with a Multi-Faith World’, by Suheil Dawani (Bishop of Jerusalem), Michael Jackson (Bishop of Clogher, Ireland), and Saw Wilme (Bishop of Taungoo, Burma). In these, the contributors’ experiences and reflections seemed to open up the conversation and be written much more for a general audience than the majority of contributions. Here it was possible to glimpse a sense of excitement about the Church and the possibilities inherent in the role of the bishop and the whole people of God; for much of the rest of the book, the discussion seemed rather tired and dusty. Worship-Shaped Life is a collection of contributions made to a conference of the International Anglican Liturgical Consult-ation in 2003, on the subject of liturgical formation. As with so many collections of conference proceedings, the quality and approach is rather uneven between the different contributions, and only some have been re-written or edited for this publication. There is nothing in this volume to disagree with, but little that was new to me. One notable exception was Solomon Amusan’s essay on ‘Liturgical Education and Formation from an African Perspective’, in which he describes the traditional liturgical practices of the Yoruba people of Nigeria in conversation with the Christian missionary heritage. It would have been interesting for this piece to have explored the possibilities inherent in that conversation in greater depth, and this contribution in particular suffers from being clearly undeveloped from the original conference contribution. Nevertheless, it is extremely valuable in documenting and analysing the liturgical (and unwritten) practices of a culture which will be unfamiliar to most readers. Whilst this book overall does not break new ground in liturgical thinking, it does provide a very useful and accessible survey of recent trends and developments. It would be a good general introduction to contemporary thinking on liturgy for those unfamiliar with the area. For example, Ruth Meyers’ contribution on ‘The Liturgical Formation of Children, Teens and Young Adults’ would be an excellent discussion paper for use in beginning to consider this issue with groups of people who had not previously reflected on children’s spirituality, or who were considering incorporating material such as Godly Play into parish worship. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes is Chaplain & Solway Fellow of
University College, Durham, and a member of General Synod.
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