Three good books may interest you this month. Val Webb’s Like Catching Water in a Net: Human attempts to describe the Divine (Continuum, New York, 2007) is my first choice. You can read Val’s own article in the last edition of EREMOS magazine (February 2008), and you may sense with me how important it is to have an Australian theologian who speaks to our own hearts. Writing from a perspective of feminist theology, Val also makes her writing relevant to different faith groups. When I read selections from my copy to my inter-faith group, I received orders for ten copies. I had to order them from the internet, but they are now available in Australia. The book won the USA Best Books 2007 Award in the category Religion—General. I quote from her chapter on the divinity of Jesus:
People can be fully committed to the GOD they discover through Jesus, a man so distinctively open to the Divine Spirit in his day, without having to make absolute claims, especially when his immediate followers did not make such claims.
Next is an unusual book which I bought from the Feminist Bookshop in Lilyfield, Sex and the Sacred: Gay identity and spiritual growth, by Daniel A Helminiak (Haworth Press, London, New York, 2006). Because this book is about the spiritual dimension in general, it has excellent overviews of attitudes to Scripture, ethics, religion and violence, as well as an in-depth treatment of human relationships, heterosexual as well as homosexual. Helminiak speaks about a ‘spirituality of authenticity’. Here is one quote from his chapter, ‘The Spiritual Crisis in Religion and Society’:
A swelling majority of goodwilled people united around respectful and wholesome living will relegate the foolishness of the radical religious fringe to the oblivion of obvious irrelevance. Offering a concerned but confused generation a sane and saintly vision will drain off the support for narrow and unthinking religion. A spirituality of authenticity provides this vision. It can become the consistent public message of an array of different religions. It can address the spiritual needs of a pluralistic and secular society. It can remedy the religious violence of our desperate age.
The third book is Quest for the Living God: Mapping frontiers in the theology of God, by Elizabeth A Johnson (Continuum, New York, London, 2007). You may remember an earlier, groundbreaking book (1992) by Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is. I remember just about wearing out my copy. It was one of my first purchases from Eremos. This new book seeks to map the ‘burgeoning renaissance of insights into God’ that has been taking place since the middle of last century. While I think it does that successfully, and is a good book to buy if you haven’t been carefully following the discussion of the last twenty years, there are many books that treat each section with more depth and colour than this book is able to do in its 200 pages. The author won many prestigious awards for her earlier books, and it will be interesting to see how this one is received. I am glad to have it, but I found Val’s book more helpful for my present journey.