Culture

Heritage Film Distribution 2012 Reviewed by Matt Gees. The movie Machine Gun Preacher gives a quick overview of the background and the early days after coming to faith for Sam Childers. The film focuses in on the orphanage he built and the struggle and toll to him personally, his family and the orphans he was helping in Sudan and Uganda. ...

Currach Press, 2011 Reviewed by Wendy Scott, Kenmore Uniting Church. Different! Intriguing! Readable. The style is part history, part social commentary and part life story. The autobiography covers book collector Philip Murray's life in Ireland. The book is unusual in that his entire life story is left out except his passion to finding or acquiring a new love with books. ...

The Bible Reading Fellowship 2012, RRP $15.95 Review by Rev [retired] Anneli Sinkko [MPhil], Buderim Uniting Church. When I asked for this book to be reviewed I was thinking that I myself am in the second half of life. But, shock and horror – I was well past it. However, when I started to read it, and I must tell ...

IVP Books RRP, $23.95 Reviewed by Ann Hewson. Juliet Brenner's training and passion for her subject shine through her careful, very readable and detailed guide. She helps the reader to begin to appreciate the work of the artists step by step. This is truly an education in how to appreciate both these paintings and therefore all art work in a ...

Darton, Longman and Todd 2011, RRP $26.95 Reviewed by Rev Dr Clive Ayre, Eco-Mission Consultant for Qld Synod. At first thought one may wonder what the writings of a Trappist monk who died in 1968 may have to do with us, but Thomas Merton is well known to scholars of religion; one of his main contentions which is reflected in ...

Text Publishing, 2012, RRP $32.95 Reviewed by Rodney Eivers. In some respects this is a sad book, as typified by the author quoting a number of times, "For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world" (2 Timothy 4:10). Yet the autobiography of Richard Holloway (formerly Bishop of Edinburgh and Primate of the Anglican Church in Scotland) is a ...

Baylor University Press 2010, RRP $43.95 Reviewed by Rev Peter Harvey. Shirl James Hoffman has grown up in and around sport and church, and so is well-suited to bring this academic style critique to the marriage of the Christian faith and sport. In Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports, he asks the reader to take a hard look ...

RRP $40, 2011 Reviewed by Bruce Dingle, Elder and Lay Preacher at Maroochydore Uniting Church. WHAT a wonderful book of memoir, imagination, history and strong Christian faith! It's the story of Rev Reg Delbridge, his wife May, their family and ancestors. Rev Reg Delbridge was born in 1888 and died in 1964. His memoirs of life in Kent, adolescence, conversion ...

Orbis Books, 2010, RRP $57.95 Reviewed by Rev Alan Renton. I am interested in mission. This book attempts, I believe successfully, to show how the church shares the holistic gospel not only with her own people but also with those who live in entirely different cultures. By holistic I mean witnessing both by spoken words and by the Word speaking ...

Penguin UK, 2012, RRP $35 Reviewed by Owen Ronalds. ALAIN De Botton does not propose a kind of cranky "new atheism" like Dawkins or Hitchens. Neither is he quite like older philosophers such as Bertrand Russell in his style and outlook. Religion for Atheists is a warm and positive appreciation of much that different religions have to give to humanity. ...