Vicar

After many years as a hands-on Christian minister, Alan Bartlett writes of what he knows well and loves wisely.

Magisterial

[On HUMANE CHRISTIANITY] This plea for a humane Christianity will encourage those who have suffered from the cruelties of institutional religion, and show how faith can really affirm the worth of the human person.

At a time when many conceive of religious faith in terms of rigidity of mind and violence of action, it is vital to listen to those voices which rightly understand Christian faith in terms of astonishing divine grace and compassionate human wisdom. Alan Bartlett is one of those voices.

What makes his book different is that it is written from an Evangelical (or, more accurately, post-Evangelical) perspective; and that it appeals a good deal to English and Anglican tradition, and especially to the writings of Jeremy Taylor, Richard Hooker and Julian of Norwich, in making the case that the Church should take a more affirmative approach to both the human condition and the totality of creation.

[On A PASSIONATE BALANCE] It is perhaps telling – and, in fact, encouraging – that in introducing the ‘Spirituality of Anglicanism’, Bartlett introduces not merely methods of prayer or mysticism divorced from content, but the history and theology of the embodied community of Anglicanism (and all the messiness and ambiguity that those three imply). That this is the case means that the book does not occupy itself with spirituality narrowly de?ned, but rather with introducing Anglicanism itself in the broad sense, of showing its elemental intuitions and impulses as seen historically in the tradition. This is an introduction to spirituality in the best sense of the word, and in its speci?cally Anglican form.