Tag: Books, Films, Art, Awards and Recipes

Bromleigh McCleneghan, a pastor of a Union Church in Chicago, has written Good Christian Sex for what she calls mainstream, Protestant Christians who have come to accept that people may live together before marriage, but are concerned to ensure sex and sexual behaviour remains good and not bad.

It finds the goodness of sex in the belief that it belongs to our being human. That includes seeing sexual desire and pleasure as something positive, whether in relation to oneself or in relation to others. The author writes of her own experiences, openly, sometimes self-critically, but always very sensibly.

This is a commonsense book likely to benefit greatly those who seek an alternative to the traditional norm of faithfulness in marriage and celibacy in singleness. It invites critical reading. It has helpful chapters on the nature of fidelity, on sexual abuse and lust which treats others as objects, and offers useful reflections on the wisdom of controlling one’s sexual desires and their expression, just as much as we need to control our appetite for food.

Walter Stratford explores spirituality as a common thread across all religions. As a retired Uniting Church Minister, he experienced how creedal boundaries tend to exclude, but discovered as a hospital chaplain and ecumenist, ways to breach these boundaries for spiritual care to be provided to those from different faiths and cultures. Spirituality, which he considers cannot be easily  defined, derives from our being deeply connected to and dependent on the natural world. He considers fostering this sense of connection as vital to spiritual care, but all too often neglected.

The book emphasises the importance of imagination and openness; the lack of it, leading to the exclusion and dogmatic inflexibility of fundamentalism. It led me to conclude that it is deeds and  not creeds which validate the faith that achieves peace through acts of justice, instead of the quasi-peace through acts of rhetorical violence that blights our present age.

This book may help the church adapt to the millennial generation that has left in increasing numbers, to welcome new comers and counter the fear of those we perceive different from ourselves.

Richard Smith

This book, first published in 1986, was based on Dutney’s thesis, The Development of the Understanding of Ministry in the Australian Church Union Negotiations 1957-1971.

He identifies strongly with the Joint Commission on Church Union (JCCU)’s reports and Proposed Basis of Union. He remains uncritical of the reports’ arguments and negative about the uniting churches.

Dutney’s picture of how the JCCU’s thought developed from 1957 to 1963 is a useful guide to that period of its work.

He writes informatively about discussion of the Proposed Basis in the uniting churches, but concentrates on individual contributions, does not consider each denomination’s detailed response, and plays down the significance of those official responses for the JCCU’s work from 1967 on.

We are so fortunate, biblical scholarship reveals two gospels. The gospel of Jesus, whose teachings to counter the sin of human violence led to his unjust death. This gospel of Jesus’ teachings became incorporated into gospels about Jesus as the Christ sent by God to die as a sacrifice for our sin.

Lorraine Parkinson, an ordained minister of the Uniting Church, with a PhD from the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Studies in Jerusalem explains both gospels in her two books.

The first, The World according to Jesus: his blue print for the best possible world (2011). Then Made on Earth: how the gospel writers created the Christ (2016) presents detailed evidence that the Christ of the gospels is the creation of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, plus later editors.

Thus the gospel writers bequeathed to Christianity two contradictory gospels. The one about Jesus the Christ, increasingly irrelevant to most people, while the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth addresses the escalating violence, which we are all called by God to resist.