Courtney McGrailWalking with Jesus: the Heart of the Christian Life
by Pope Francis, edited by Giuliano Vigini
(Dalton, Longman & Todd, 9.99)
There is a Chinese saying “the longest journey begins with the first step”. The idea of the journey, or rather, the walk, is according to the editor of this book at the heart of the Pope’s vision.
As with his earlier book, The Church of Mercy, this book is put together from the Pope’s talks and comments. The editor, Giuliano Vigini, is the Professor of Sociology of Contemporary Publishing at the Catholic University of Milan.
A journey implies an end. A walk, however, suggests, time to experience what is encountered along the way. The end is important, that is implicit, but walking with Jesus is a way of encountering and trying understanding what we meet upon the way.
We can recall that as often as not the Jesus of the Gospels is a man on the move. Even at the end, on the road to Emmaus, the disciples unbeknownst to themselves encountered him and learned from him, even before they realised who he was at that moment in the inn at the breaking the bread.
“This is the source of our confidence and our joy: to walk with Jesus,” Pope Francis writes. “And this is not easy, or comfortable, because the way that Jesus chooses is the way of the Cross. Yet we know that Jesus has won, and that we need not fear the cross.”
Dr Vigini provides not only an introduction, but also a key to the specific documents from which the selected passages come. The book itself is therefore a guide for readers – and walkers – to new areas of insight hidden, and so as yet unexplored by them, in the writings of the Pope. P.C.
Paradoxology: Why Christianity was Never Meant to be Simple
by Krish Kandiah
(Hodder, £9.99)
This is an interesting book by a popular British Christian writer. The question he asks his readers is: “What if Christianity has survived so long not in spite but precisely because of its apparent contradictions.” “Can it be that the tensions between what seem to be opposing doctrines is the factor where true faith come alive?” Can it be, he asks, that it is in what might seem to be the most difficult parts of the Bible, God is most clearly revealed?
These may seem like heavy theological ideas, yet the author approaches his theme in what is an easily read way through the leading characters of the Bible from Abraham to Paul.
He challenges his readers to consider not only those passages that give us comfort, but also those “dark sayings” which so often perturb people. “It is precisely because we are convinced that God is good, compassionate and gracious that we face such challenges and tensions when our hope and the reality of life do not match up.”
We are not to avoid these tensions he says (echoing here Pope Francis), but to live with them. That, after all, is what faith ought to mean for a Christian. P.C.