Tag: Books, Films, Art, Awards and Recipes

Bruce Barber is a Uniting Church minister and selfconfessed preacher. The title of this book is a reference to Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman from The Gay Science of 1887 in which  a madman lit a lantern at noon and ran to the marketplace crying that he was looking for God. The parable announces the death of God under the auspices of the Modern age.

Bruce’s  analysis is genealogical in that he traces the changes that have occurred in Christian theology from the early church to the Medieval  to the Modern and, for the lack of a better term, the post-Modern. This does not mean that there are no people who now understand theology in the mode of the preceding eras, but it does point to a succession in which theologies outlast their usefulness. This genealogy of ideas goes some way towards explaining why, in our day of the Modern-post- Modern cusp, preaching has become largely unintelligible and  alienated from general discourse.

William Emilsen is deeply committed to collecting observations about, and recording the history of, the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA). He was a founder of Uniting Church Studies, and earlier edited the collections Marking Twenty Years (1997) and The Uniting Church in Australia: The first 25 years (2003).

An Informed Faith has chapters on spirituality, ministry,  scholarship, The Basis of Union, management, politics, Uniting Church schools, ecology, the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, living cross-culturally, other faiths and  evangelical and progressive Christianity. Authors include Ian Breward, Chris Budden, Tony Floyd, Katharine Massam, Marion Maddox, Michael Owen, Geoff Thompson and Val Webb.

I was recently sitting in a trendy cafe, reading my review copy of Making Sense of Sex. It was a somewhat embarrassing moment, sat in public view reading a book about sex and early  Jewish and Christian literature. I was convinced that those around me were thinking ‘what a lunatic’ as everyone knows the Christian position on sex; that is: somewhere between  vehemently and slightly opposed. For many of us within the Christian tradition, this opposition sits in direct contrast to our understanding and experience of the God of life.

There is very little reliable information about how the early Jewish and Christian communities understood sexuality. The debates that have raged in our churches have been  ideologically driven; using scripture to prove our point, whichever side of the debate we are on. William embarked on a five-year research project with the aim of listening to the early  Jewish and Christian communities understanding of sexuality.

In his introductory chapter Hugh Mackay looks at the Utopia complex being sold to us by business, the media and general societal pressure. He suggests that the pursuit of  happiness can actually make you miserable. We seem to think that happiness is our default position whereas often we grow through pain. Wholeness can involve the whole range of emotions and  experiences.