Anne Phillips, The Faith of Girls: Children's Spirituality and Transition into Adulthood (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology; Ashgate, 2011)
This is a revised version of Phillips PhD dissertation. It is a study of the faith and spirituality of girls aged 11-13, an area ignored. Building on the work of the likes Nicola Slee (Women's Faith Development), Phillips listens to the voices of young girls in conversation with current psychological, philosophical and sociological thinking and contemporary theological and biblical scholarship. One of the bits I really like about the book is the discussions of the few biblical passages which include girls at the beginning of several of the chapters. This is an important study. It is, as often the case with published dissertations, fairly academic, which may put some readers off (unfortunately along with the price - a paperback version would be must welcome), but it is worth perserving with. My only dissapointment is that must of the comment and discussion about Baptists has been removed. Phillips is a Baptist minister and Co-Principal of Northern Baptist Learning Community. I hope Phillips shares her work more broadly within Baptist structures.
Doug Gay, Remixing the Church: Towards an Emerging Ecclesiology (SCM, 2011)
This is a very welcome book and out just in time for Greenbelt. I've been looking forward to the book since Gay gave a seminar at Greenbelt a few years back outlining the major argument. Where so much of the emerging church conversation seems to be dominated by the United States, this is a helpful study from a UK perspective. Remixing the Church picks up 'five moves' of an emerging ecclesiology: auditing, retrieval, unbundling, supplementing, and remixing. In this Gay tells the story of how alternative worship and emerging church developed, setting it in the wider conversations that have been taking place over the last fifty years in worship, mission, church and culture and church and politics. This provides some academic rigour and helpful maps what the emerging church is all about and the reasons behind it. The book is partly a defence of the emerging church, but without agression and with a desire to help people understand what the emerging church has and is doing. The book is also wanting to be a positive contribution to those primarily involved and those outside the emerging church to what the this remixed church and worship has to offer the future of the Christian church. One slightly annoying feature is in places it is fairly repetitive regarding certain books, in particular After Our Likeness by Volf and With the Grain of the Universe by Hauerwas.
James B. Krabill and Stuart Murray (eds.), Forming Christian Habits in Post-Christendom: The Legacy of Alan and Eleanor Kreider (Hearld Press, 2011)
This is a fairly gentle book that has collected over forty different friends of Alan and Eleanor Kreider to reflect on their theology and witness around the themes of mission, community and worship. I say gentle because it is largely uncritical and unacademic and lots of the contributors tell stories (this is intentional as the editors explain in their chapter). This makes the book an easy read and is also a good example of embodied theology. However, I had also hoped for something that wrestled a little more deeply and critically with the Kreiders. The theme of the book, as the title suggests, Forming Christian Habits in Post-Christendom, is most apt in terms of what the Kreiders are about and the current conversation in the church around habits and practices (see Wells and Hauerwas, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics; James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom; and Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra, Practicing Our Faith).
Thanks Andy - comments appreciated
Posted by: Doug Gay | August 25, 2011 at 12:01 AM