Vicar's Study - I Know How She Does It

I'm a bit in love with a new book I am reading. Do you remember that film (or indeed the book) 'I Don't Know How She Does It' with Sarah Jessica Parker? I remember watching that with this sinking feeling about the future. This was going to be me, I thought, the Mum who fakes homemade pies by bashing them with a rolling pin or who is always rushing from one place to the next trying to maintain a career I love and a family I am devoted to.

from dailymotion.co.uk

Well, scrap all that 'I Know How She Does It' by Laura Vanderkam is like the complete reversal of all this and has actually given me some semblance of hope that I can pursue goals at home and in my leisure time as well as at work. If you too have vague hopes of (or indeed are attempting to pull off!) combining a full personal and family life with a busy and successful work life, then this book could be a bit of a revelation for you too!

The book is like going to Time Management Bootcamp. Week One with the book and I was filling in a time log of my every movement every fifteen minutes, 24 hours a day, for a week. My goodness this in itself was a revelation! It turns out I make a massive big deal about some things that use hardly any of my time and allocate next to no time for some of the things that are most important to me in life. Who knew?!

from Lauravanderkam.com

Laura encourages you to start looking at your week as 168 hours rather than 24 hour blocks when looking for balance and fulfilment. Yes, some days may be crazy with work, but other days you can leave at 4 and have drinks with your best friend or take your kids to the library. Adding up how much time I spent on different activities gave me much more of a sense of calm and challenged that little voice saying 'You are so busy! This such a nightmare!'. Yes, my work life is busy but actually it only takes up about 50 hours a week. With 56 hours of sleep that still leaves 62 hours in my week to do with exactly as I please. Not too shabby!

This is a lovely thought when you are in the midst of a busy work day. Laura even suggests that if you want to make inroads at work then you might consider working more hours. Steady on! But the thing about thinking about your time is that it allows you to take control of it. To make informed decisions about how you want to spend it rather than dashing from thing to thing headless chicken style and exclaiming 'I don't have any time!' Likewise she also suggest that we really consider how we want to spent our leisure time rather than assuming we have none as this is a sure fire way to lose all your personal time into the blackhole of internet browsing and watching endless reruns of The Big Bang Theory (or is that just me?!)

 

Laura presents life a mosaic and encourages you to move the slots around as it works best for you and gives you a huge wealth of tips, based on compiling time logs of many women in high level careers, on how to get the best out of your work life, family time and personal life. Getting all you want out of life, she suggests, is about playing around with the tiles until you get an interesting, varied and full picture emerging. The picture that you really want. For me this picture includes growing in my new role at work, working on this blog, praying (I have to say that as Vicar right? but it actually keeps me sane!), sewing, cooking meals from scratch and having little adventures in London visiting all the museums and eating and extraordinary amount of cake. I can indeed do all of these things! Hurrah!

I can't recommend it enough, particularly if you are currently looking at your life and wondering how it is all going to happen in the hours you have Or if you have a bucket list as long as your arm and feel like the time just isn't there to pursue the interest you want to. I would practically press it into your hands if you are feeling overwhelmed at the moment by all the demands of your life. So basically, read it! This is a great little book.

Vicar's Study - The Art of Being Brilliant

When I bought this book from a charity shop the woman behind the till looked at me as if I was buying The Art of War or something equally sinister. Granted thinking about 'Being Brilliant' is a highly un-British thing to do. Being 'alright, thanks' is far more socially acceptable. Striving for 'brilliant' just seems, well, a bit much really doesn't it?

But that is the great thing about this little book. It is written by two British Andy's who cut through the sometimes slightly nauseating world of books that consider our approach to life to produce a book on Positive Psychology that is neither academic nor puke making. If you haven't encountered it before Positive Psychology is, in layman's terms, the ever growing branch of psychology that looks at what makes people happy, resilient and well rather than simply studying what happens when things go wrong.

What the Andy's suggest is that so much of our interior world is of our own creating. We are sort of set up that way. Our brains are made to analyse and make sense of the world around us and we do his all day long. We don't simply take in everything around us as it is, we screen, we filter, we judge everything around us and take in a fraction of what we sense and experience. We really do create our own world in so many ways.

A few years back when I read a book about our consumer culture in the West I started to get more suspicious of the news seeing that it was more about ratings and copies sold than about genuine communication of what is going on. The more I read about positive psychology, the more suspicious I get. Because the news acts as a good example of how our lens on the world completely affects what we believe about it. If we fill our minds with a litany of disaster, destruction and violence then that is how we will see the world.

These things exist, to be sure, and being aware and responsive to the needs of the world is so important, but does having a constant stream of disaster playing in our living rooms do much for us or does it simply skew our view of the world to the point where we barely notice the peace and joy that is to be had in our every day lives and the real goodness in the people we meet?

A truly brilliant contents page!

These is just one of the things that the Andy's challenge in their book as they ask the reader to look again at their lens on life, to reassess and to aim higher in terms of your own happiness and well being. They challenge many of the ideas that we simply accept in life, about how life is and how we ought to experience it and I find that exciting.

In a nutshell (does that make anyone else thing of Austin Powers or is it just me?!) it is about getting to grips with the fact that we have one life, one chance to ask the questions we have and explore the world with gusto. I'm half way through and already finding it to be an uplifting and funny read. So if you can bear the scorn of the shopkeeper then grab yourself a copy, it is well worth it!

Vicar's Study - Compass Books

There are books in my house that I see less as pieces of paper bound together and more like compasses. They have been companions on the journey and I have turned to them constantly. You know the sort, dog eared and the spines bent, but you couldn't ever consider getting a new copy because this is the one that has been in your hands through all the ups and down of life.

On the blog this week, for the 30 Second Reflections I post each morning, are some excepts from some of my 'compass books'. One, an anthology of Christian poetry, I brought shortly after I started going to church. It has been opened a hundred times or more and spoken to me in big ways and small of how I am feeling right in that moment.

I've also collected women's poetry and writing for a long time. I love this old Penguin collection because it draws together the writing of women back to ancient times right up to modern day and from women all around the world. It got me into the Japanese poems of the Manyoshu, short little poems filled with images of summer blossom and love, and to writers from closer to home like the gloomy and atmospheric poetry of Emily Bronte.

Sometimes these little books have seemed to speak directly to a question I am asking. In this little anthology of women's spiritual writings I read an except from the diary of Florence Nightingale shortly after my 30^th birthday feeling simultaneously overawed by the approach of starting work as a Vicar and also part wishing I was more, well, normal! It read,

''I am 30, the age when Christ began his mission...The thoughts and feelings that I have now I can remember since I was six years old. It was not I that made them...But why, oh my God, cannot I be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people?'

That quote wasn't an answer to the things I was mulling over it just gave a sense of solidarity. A sense of solidarity that someone else wrestles with the same thoughts too and someone as brave and bold and extraordinary as Florence Nightingale!

I think that is why these books are so precious and what they are all about for me. Not answers, but guides. Not the destination, but signposts. And we all need those things. We all need the occasional person, or poem, or piece of writing to nudge us on the way of the journey through life that only we can make and that no one else can make for us.

So how about you, what are you 'compass books'? I'd love to hear from you!

Vicar's Study - Landmarks by Margaret Silf

Have you ever wished that in life you had been given a manual? Or perhaps, to keep up with the times, an internal Sat Nav! Someone or something to tell you 'Go this way' or 'Stop here'. Someone to tell you when you need to make a shift or when you need to just stay in lane. Wouldn't life be so much easier if we made our arrival into the world with a set of instructions for getting the best out of things!

One of my favourite books, that I always find myself going back to, explores just this idea. Landmarks by Margaret Silf  is like a guide to making your own guide for life, it is a way of digging down into your own personal route map. A way of looking back at where you have been, looking honestly at where you are now and setting a course for the future.
 

 

I started reading the book when I will thinking about a gigantic change in my life and hesitating over whether to put myself forward for ordained ministry. More than anything at that time I really need to dig down in to what I was really about as a person, what made me tick, where on earth I was going.

It opens with a depiction of what it means to be a person which made so much sense to me that I find it often pops up again when I am thinking about my life. Here is a little diagram from the book:

 

 

What really struck me about this was that we spend so much time trying to change our life by changing the outer 'where' circle. You know the way - 'If only I had this new job then I would be different, feel different' or 'If only I had this new relationship, or got out of this old one, then I would be happy'. So often though, when you move, you find that unfortunately you have followed yourself to this new location and set of circumstances and it feels quickly just the same as the old ones.

That is of course not to say that changing things in life is always meaningless or pointless, I am currently reaping the benefits of a massive lifestyle change that reading Landmarks spurred me on to, but rather that we need to understand that real change occurs at the 'Who' level at the base of who we really are. Only attending to our real selves will make the difference that we crave. Only knowing our deepest desires, and understanding them, will we be able to make the good choices for our lives that really move us on towards having the things in life we crave.

Landmarks is eminently practical. Each chapter ends with ideas for reflection and it is very much take it or leave it as it appeals to you. It is based on a Christian meditative practice, the Ignatian method, but is broad and generous in its approach. It definitely takes as a given that there is a God factor in this whole thing but makes little presumption about how you might understand God so there is plenty of room to explore whether you consider yourself religious or really just not very sure!
 

Now I am in a new season I find myself going back to Landmarks again. Wondering, exploring and having another look at my own deep desires and internal route map. Even for an activist like me time spent reflecting in this way pays of in spades. If you pick up Landmarks do let me know what you think, and I hope it helps you a little on your way too.

Vicar's Study - Unapologetic by Francis Spufford

'You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown up dignity. It is called Unapologetic because it isn't giving an 'apologia', the technical term for a defence of the ideas.

And also because I'm not sorry.'
 

 

In the last few weeks I have been volunteering at a cathedral. Every evening at about quarter to five the choir wander in, a rag tag bunch of boys clasping music sheets and jostling each other as they head to their stalls. A couple of minutes later and the cathedral is filled with sound. Voices blending together, soaring. It draws me into another world, to a sense of order and of beauty and of rightness. Just for a moment as I sit there and let the music flow over me I feel connecting to something bigger than myself. I feel at peace.
 

It is with this kind of experience that Francis Spufford opens his book Unapologetic. No one can know if God exists, he argues, it isn't something that can be answered definitively one way or another whether you are the Archbishop of Canterbury or Richard Dawkins. But this sense of something, this whisper into the silence, he argues, is a reasonable basis for belief in something greater. Emotions are our 'tools for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof of disproof'. This emotional experience of an 'otherness', an order, a peace in the world, is the basis of what he explores in his book.

He is certainly not hopping on the hippy train and as he would put it 'joining John and Yoko around the white piano' and proclaiming the whole world to be one big ball of love and peace, man, if you just connect on in to it. No, for me, he gets to the heart of the Christian message about the world that both presents humanity as irreplaceably wonderful and heartbreakingly broken.

This he calls HPtFtU, the 'Human Propensity to F*** Things Up'. We all have it and we all spend most of our time pretending that we don't. Trying to label someone else as the problem rather than recognize our own dark corners. Peace, he argues, is hard won not some default state of human nature. It is our potential not our possession.

He is refreshingly honest about the brokenness of the church (that HPtFtU again!), the brokenness of the world and the depth of human suffering. He doesn't shy away from asking how on earth this can be the case if at the centre of the universe is a God of love. He presents no platitudes, no explanations that perhaps seem ok on the surface but even a tiny amount of exploration suggests a God who stands up to no ones definition of good. Instead he turns to the Christian answer to suffering which isn't a proposition so much as a story..
 

'Imagine a man, then....Imagine a man in whom the overwhelming, all at once perspective of the God of everything is not a momentary glimpse from which he rebounds, reeling, but a continual presence which in him is somehow adapted to the scale of the human mind, so that for him, uniquely, the shining is not other but self.'
 

This story of one man, Yeshua (his Hebrew name. Yep, you guessed it, it's that Jesus guy again!), doesn't pat us on the back and say 'there there' or 'just pretend it's not happening' but takes us into the depths of our human experience. I am about the embark in church on eight days of remembering the last days of Jesus' life. We engage in what probably looks like a pretty depressing set of services remembering a particularly unpleasant death to mark that hope in the human situation can't come from burying our heads in the sand.
 

It is about recognizing that we can't escape the realities of life and death, that we can only pass through them. But more than that it is about saying that someone already has. And not just anyone but The One. That voice of beauty and love and wonder that speaks in those moments of transcending peace. This act, this taking on of all that is broken in the world and in our own hearts, is the death knell for suffering, the remedy for the HPtFtU, the outstretched hand of unconditional love.

And what does that mean when we emerge from all this on Easter Sunday? Francis puts it well,

 

'Don't be careful. Don't be surprised by any human cruelty. But don't be afraid. Far more can be mended than you know'.

 

This is an extraordinary book, do read it.

World Book Day: Five Books I Love

I'm writing from my sick bed (I know, get out the violins!) but I couldn't resist posting for World Book Day. The one advantage of this enforced time at home is a renewed a appreciation of some of the lovely things I am blessed to have. So here, in celebration of the wonderful thing that is the book, are five of my favs that have made my life infinitely richer.

How much poorer would life be without rich fictional worlds to escape to? Every time I read about Mama Ramotswe I want to go back to Africa.

 

 

Books have hugely enriched my spiritual life and this ragged old copy of Margaret Silf's Landmarks speaks for itself as to how influential it has been for me (and my husband who has used it over and over again in his classes at school!).

 



 

And what about a beautiful old book? These Handy Shakespeares from 1892 are still my pride and joy since I picked them up working in a second hand bookshop.

In recent years I've gotten more and more into reading history. This book kicked all that off. Not only is it beautiful (and another find from that second hand bookshop) but is also based on where I grew up, in Windsor rather than the Castle that is! I'm not secretly royalty!!

 

 

My cookbook collection is growing to epic proportions but I just can't resist it when you can pick one up in a charity for the price of a magazine. My eclectic cookbook collection has taught me to cook everything from Spanish to French to Indian to Greek and I LOVE it.

 

 

 

And lastly, because I couldn't resist one more, what about all those childhood stories? They remind me of sunny days and, as Lewis Carroll writes in the back of this edition of Alice, of -

 

'that delicious dreamy feeling when one first wakes on a summer morning, with the twitter of birds in the air, and the fresh breeze coming in at the window when, lying lazily with eyes half shut, one sees as in a dream green boughs waving or waters rippling in a golden light'.

 

 

Happy World Book Day!

Vicar's Study: Let the Women Speak

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at Christ Church Cathedral. I am doing some volunteering there to get some experience of the life and work of a cathedral and my first day involved a tour and a brief insight into its history. During the tour I was surprised and pleased to discover that the patron saint of not just the cathedral but also Oxford University and the city of Oxford as a whole is St Frideswide.

Born around 680 Frideswide is credited with founding a church, a community of women, around which it is quite likely the city of Oxford grew. There is little historical detail of her life still available to us but there is a shrine to her in the cathedral which historically drew people from across the country seeking healing. Today it is still a place of prayer and sanctuary. Frideswide is tucked away in the corner of the cathedral and I had previously known hardly anything about her. And yet her name means 'Strong Peace' and she stands as a foundation stone that a whole city grew around.

I was particularly surprised by this female founder because my time in Oxford has frequently been rather a macho affair. Though the church is full of inspiring women, who are many times its real back bone, the voices that emerge most loudly are often the male ones. The history of the church is dominated with stories of men, the portraits that line the walls of our theological college are nearly all of men.

Even now working and thriving in the church as a woman takes a steady resolve and a good deal of wisdom. Though a lot of progress has been made I often feel that the difficulty that the male dominated nature of the institutional church poses for women is poorly understood or reflected upon. One way, it seems to me, that this can be addressed is by remembering and honouring inspirational women in both our heritage and in the present.

 

 

This last week I have been reading a book called God's Troublemakers - How Women of Faith are Changing the World by Katharine Rhodes Hendreson. I've found it a hugely inspirational read. Not only does it chart some of the significant achievements of women in the modern day at addressing some of society's greatest needs but it also looks at how women are doing so uniquely and with a different model to that which has gone before. One of the exciting facets of these women's work is their connection to the grass roots which drives their activism to change the system.

 

 

Rather that being distant from the problems they are attempting to alleviate, such as domestic violence and child poverty, these women place themselves at the heart of it. This is significantly different to what we experience of many of our senior leaders day to day who often seem to have lost touch with the 'real world' and the people in it. I wonder if having an experience of alienation, for whatever reason, is raising up some interesting leaders. Put simply if you have experienced discrimination perhaps you are less likely to discriminate. Perhaps we can begin to generate leaders who refuse the lure of the ivory tower and dominating power and instead seek to raise people up and value the human connection as a primary driving force for their work.
 

I'm encouraged that when I am ordained in the Cathedral it will be in the shadow of a great woman. It will help me to remember that those women are there in our history even if we sometimes forget to celebrate them. It will remind me that it is perhaps not so strange after all for me, as weak as I feel, to take my place in the church. That, as women, we have a heritage too and we can go on as leaders in the future with confidence in our place, following in the footsteps of those women who have gone before us.

Vicar's Study: Science and the Meaning of Life

As I've mentioned before my first degree, before studying Theology in my late twenties, was in Biology. I spent a glorious three years at Bristol University the first of which involved dissecting my way through the animal kingdom (gross but fascinating!). This was followed by another two years specializing in my main interests which ranged from animal behaviour to neuroscience to a frankly idyllic fortnight studying the plant life of the Mediterranean in Portugal.

I've always loved nature, always been fascinated by science and I've always been baffled by the raised eyebrows I get when I say that I have studied both Biology AND Theology. It's true that in the early days of study, when I was a signed up atheist of the Dawkins' tribe, that I did assume that the two were incompatible. One was evidence based, the other based on blind hope and fantasy. One explained life as it was, the other made projections onto the world of how we want it to be. I couldn't understand how Dinosaurs could have been part of the plan of the creation of human beings and quite how they fitted into the creation story of Genesis. Any talk of God was swiftly and effectively dismissed by our lecturers in Evolutionary Biology. This was not place to think about the question of God let alone talk about it.

It probably seems particularly odd, then, that in this context I first started to explore and became committed to the Christian faith. Science, rather than directing me to the impossibility of God, seemed to be doing the opposite. Rather it was opening up a world of wonder and awe. A world of beautiful laws and intricate mechanisms that showed life as an unrelenting and eternal force. While I was watching plants hanging on for dear life in the rocky crags of the Med or looking at deep sea images captured by fishing boats not just my mind but my spirit was opening up to something wonderful, the irrepressibility of life and the sheer wonder of our being here.
 

Of course many people experience this through science and never feel the need to ask the question of God or indeed answer it a different way than I have. But the idea that being passionate about science and believing in God are incompatible or that to believe in God you have to be fundamentally irrational and reject all evidence is plainly false. For one so many leading scientists are people of faith that this idea is immediately shown up for what it is, a prejudice.

 

I've recently been reading a book by another atheist scientist turned theologian, Alister McGrath called Dawkins' God – Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life that I would really recommend if this something that interests you. It took me right back to my uni days looking at Dawkins' Self Gene theory, the compatibility of the theory of evolution and ideas of a creator God in historic Christian thinking and a critique of the idea that faith is 'blind trust'.
 

Ultimately it raises the important issue of the relationship between science and religion and argues for a much more varied history than is popularly suggested today. To many thinkers of the past my experience of finding easy compatibility between my love of science and love of God is nothing new. Perhaps Biology and Theology aren't such an eyebrow raising combination after all!

Vicar's Study: Presence by Patsy Rodenburg

My latest church placement has me in the centre of Oxford, a place where people treat having a PhD how the rest of the country treats having a smattering of GCSEs. It's pretty standard to find yourself sitting next to a Professor of Philosophy or, in my case, someone who just a couple of months ago was lecturing me as part of my Theology degree. To add to these esteemed clientele there is also the small matter of the church being impossibly grand with every role done to absolute perfection. It is completely intimidating.

A few weeks ago I went to visit our Voice Coach at college to get a few tips for holding my own in this new world in which I have found myself. I felt so nervous leading services in that setting that I found it hard to connect to the words on the page in front of me. Quite frankly I just wanted to get to the end of the page unscathed! She asked me how I was approaching it so far and I said 'Well, I just fake confidence and no one seems to really notice.' She smiled at me knowingly and sent me off with some homework to look up the work of Patsy Rodenburg on Presence and to come back to her.

 

Patsy trains actors for a living and, as you can see in this clip, first came up with her theory of Presence on the basis of mulling over what people mean when they say that some actors have 'it' and other simply do not. Call it what you like, presence or the X factor(!), on some level we all know it when we see it. Whether that is at a play or watching a film where the actor just connects in an extraordinary way or whether it is the flip-side and experiencing a disconnection in our interaction with someone. You know how it goes, the lights are on but no one is home! We know when we are experiencing real human connection and it is that connection, that the person is bringing who they are to the table, that makes the interaction real and influential.
 

Patsy's theory is based around three circles. The First Circle is someone who is withdrawn, hiding from the world as a form of protection. Their body language is hunched, their voice is soft and quiet, they are drawn into themselves. On the other hand a Third Circle person is completely out there. People in Third Circle take up lots of space, speak really loudly and have a presence that can come across as overbearing. Third circle can be controlling. It keeps people in their place but it doesn't deep down connect to the other. And lastly there is a Second Circle. The Second Circle person connects. They have 'it' because you are seeing the real deal. They have the confidence to let you see the truth about who they are. Patsy argues that for a number of careers, including being a Religious Leader, you must operate predominantly in Second Circle.

This all makes an awful lot of sense to me because I have seen it over and over again. Whether it is one on one or from the pulpit people need to see the real you to get anything from the message that you are bringing. Too often sermons land way over people's heads because they don't come from a real and vulnerable place in the person who is speaking. Connecting with people means being willing to take the walls down. It means growing in real confidence and it means not being afraid to show people who you really are.

So there we have it, I've talked myself into quite a corner, haven't I? This book has made me realise that I need to continue on the road to genuine confidence in this setting because it is the only way I will really be able to do my job well. It has made me reassess what it is about this environment that makes me doubt myself. It is one of my core values that everyone is equal and should be treated as such. As great as it is to be intelligent, it is just as great to be creative. As wonderful as it is to have eloquence, it is just as wonderful to be able to speak from the heart in whatever words you have. Flare can be learned but integrity runs much deeper.

Being present means offering to others the most precious thing you have, yourself. Only then will people really trust you, really know you and really connect to what it is that you bring. That is no small task but, I'm convinced, it is a worthwhile one.

Vicar's Study - Is Religion Dangerous? by Keith Ward

I first spotted this book at the book stall at my local church. It seemed like a funny thing for a church to be selling and reading it around theological college has certainly raised a few eyebrows this week. But the title immediately grabbed me because it is such a common view that religion is dangerous and the root of many of the problems in world. Even as a religious person I partly believed it. How can you not in the face of current world events? I only need to delve a mere fraction into the history of my own faith to be full of horror and dismay at what people have used the Christian faith to justify. Every religious person ought to take this seriously.

The book tackles its question in four sections, Religion and violence, Are religious beliefs irrational? Are religious believe immoral? and Does religion do more harm than good? Ward, a philosopher and former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, challenges as inaccurate the notion that most violent conflicts in history have religion as their cause. Indeed many of the conflicts of the 20^th century had no direct relationship to religion but rather emerged from tribal or political issues. Ward suggests that the problem, at root, is humanity rather than religion and religion itself attests to this brokenness in the human state. Just as no one would suggest doing away with democracy because it lead to Hitler, likewise doing away with religion because of the corruption of its values by some individuals is unreasonable. Likewise religion has been a powerful force for reconciliation as seen so powerfully in the work of Desmond Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Council in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.

Still, the content of religious values is rightly questioned by many when such views are used to excuse the killing of innocent people or hatred and intolerance in our society. How can anything which generates these kind of views be beneficial to society? Here Ward highlights the danger in judging a whole system of thought and practice on the basis of extremes or perversions of that system. Islamic State need to be held in contrast with the work of Islamic relief organizations around the world and the peaceful and humane practice of the vast majority of Muslims. Conflict between religious groups needs to be held in contrast with the many communities working in peace, harmony and respect with each other.

I have been struck in the last few years, as I have got more involved in inter-faith work in the UK, how little the remarkable friendship and co-operation between faith groups here goes completely uncommented on in society and media. One of my most touching experiences in my faith of recent months was discussing my experience of God with a Muslim woman while attending Muslim Friday prayers. Neither of us expected the other to reject our own beliefs or abandon our differences. I believe that Jesus is the saviour of the world, Muslims don't. It is pretty hard to get around that. As Ward notes, describing the major world faiths as 'a search for supreme goodness', both our faiths teach respect for the other, a love of humanity and a valuing of human life. This, to me, has a huge amount to say to a society where difference is often managed poorly and where the individual is often valued for their status or usefulness rather than on the basis of their human dignity.

Ward also tackles a huge range of issues around the nature of religious belief and how this affects human behaviour. Is faith damagingly irrational? Does a belief in life after death lead to a devaluing of human life in the here and now? Are religions with holy books always susceptible to the dangers of taking old outdated laws literally? Is faith a delusional behaviour? Is faith damaging or enriching to our physical and mental wellbeing? You'll have to grab a copy to explore these questions more. I found it hugely enriching and, for what its worth, would definitively recommend it. Perhaps it is best, though, to end on some of Keith Ward's own words.

'So is religion dangerous? Sometimes it is. But it is also one of the most powerful forces in the world for good...At best religion, the search for supreme goodness, a life lived for the sake of good alone, will help promote the welfare of all sentient beings. Some danger is unavoidable in any human enterprise. But religion is a main driving force for wisdom and compassion in a world that would be bleak and cruel without it.'