In the Beginning - Pictures by Jan Pienkowski

In the Beginning

I have always been a great fan of Meg and Mog and so the recent discovery of this book made it a must have.

Its arrival came with a couple of surprises, first its large format – 15 inch square – I had expected, without justification, for it to be the same size as your standard Meg and Mog.

The other surprise came reading the cover notes, Jan Pienkowski is a man – this came as more of a surprise than I expected.  Somehow we do tend to align the creator with their creations and so it was natural for me to bracket Jan and Meg together.  

I have always held Meg as something of a role model and so there was some deep, if ultimately small, shift in my self understanding to realise there is a significant discontinuity between Meg and the real world, as embodied by Jan (or perhaps I am overplaying the importance of gender).

The selection of Bible stories are all from the Old Testament and there is a delightfully “Old Testament” approach.  We have the murder of Abel, bones at the bottom of the ocean below Noah’s ark, Mrs Potiphar, Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea etc. It is good to have a quality “children’s” book that does not sentimentalise the Bible. 

The text is just a verse or two per page, and many stories are given with just a one page “snap shot”, but around them your could sit and tell the story – it is a book to engage children with rather than to leave them to read alone.

In some ways this might seem a very simple book, but the pictures have a rich charm which will bring you back to them time and again.  For example it is interesting that Jacob’s ladder is shown as a double helix – that set a whole range of thoughts and imaginings running.  

 

The State of the World Atlas by Dan Smith

The State of the World Atlas

The geographer in me was tempted to buy this Atlas when the religion map was featured in the Church Times a few weeks ago.

There is great coverage of different issues, population, economics, health, environmental and such like and it is seeing the different maps together that really begins to add up to a bigger picture. 

We all know there are no lies like Statistics, and when stats are given visual expression extreme caution is needed.  Published by the New Internationalist the narrative and the selection of issues is clearly within a particular political world view (for example the comparison of Gross National Income to the revenue of transnationals has an implicit suggestion that the power of these transnationals is problematic).

However when on map after map there is a great red sweep across the centre of Africa you can’t avoid acknowledging there is something going on.   Also startling is seeing that per capita China’s Gross National Income is in the same bracket as Angola and St Lucia.  It is making these kinds of connections which are the strength.

The Art of Tentmaking - Making Space for Worship Edited by Stephen Burns

The Art of Tentmaking: Making Space for Worship

This collection of essays in honour of Richard Giles is best described as "slight". Despite a line up of fairly heavy weight writers we get a selection of personal anecdotes strung together with flimsy theorizing and much hyperbole.

There is lots about Giles enthusiasm to share his vision and his charismatic abilities to do so - but if we are blunt the vision has made little impact beyond the regimes in which Giles had the authority to autocratically put vision into practice.

One eassy that did stand out was that of Steven Croft, seeking simplicity in liturgy after decades of escalating complexity in Common Worship - simplicity not just within particular liturgical acts but simplicity in the landscape of a worshipping community week to week.

Another, and perhaps related theme, from Stephen Cotterell seemed to be that if we get the actions of liturgy right then the words will become much less important.

The reflection I will take most strongly way from it is Richard Giles' interesting way of understanding "the priesthood of all believers" - that this should not be taken, as it almost invariably is, as an individualistic identity.  It is not that each believer is in and of themselves endowed with a separate priesthood, but that all believers share in a collective priesthood.  The exercise of this priesthood therefore is only intelligible within community.    

However overall I was left feeling a little let down.