Val Web -- "Like Catching Water in a Net"
Val Webb is not out to prove the existence of a God or the Divine, but to set out intuitions or intimations of the Divine nature and attributes from the stories and literature of the world's religions. Casting her net more widely than Karen Armstrong in The History of God or Jack Miles in God: A Biography, Webb delves deeply into the poetry and sayings of Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics, the nature religion of the ancient Mesopotamians, their kin the Israelites, and the Aboriginal people of her own beloved Australia. Raised in the Christian fundamentalist tradition, she poses a critical challenge to the ways in which traditional Christianity has straitjacketed our Western notions of the Divine, here aligning herself with modern mystics like William James, Leo Tolstoy, and Florence Nightingale. In the final chapter, she shows how the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, and their contemporary followers is quite compatible with so many of the traditional notions about God surveyed in the book.  Helen Salmon.

The Emerging Christian Way- Marcus J. Borg (and others).

 
Illuminating the St Mary's conflict.     Peter Kennedy. The man who threatened Rome
ANDREW HAMILTON DECEMBER 11, 2009                                               ISBN   9780980564365 (pbk)

Flanagan, Martin et al: Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened Rome. One Day Hill, Melbourne, 2009. ISBN 978 0 9805643 6 5.
The conflict between Archbishop John Bathersby and Fr Peter Kennedy's St Mary's congregation was passionate and public. This valuable book illuminates the dispute, setting it into a human context that is both much smaller and larger than that offered by the media coverage.
The most instructive and moving contributions to the book are studies of people involved. Two interviews of Kennedy by Martin Flanagan serve as book ends. Flanagan catches the contemplative and detached character of Kennedy's personality. These make his understated religious leadership so formidable and so attractive.
Michele Gierck's profiles of a range of people involved in the life of the congregation are also deeply insightful. She allows them to speak for themselves, perhaps more eloquently than they knew they could speak. The stories of people help you see the depth of what is involved in the building and pulling down of communities, the precarious lives that find some mending, the desired connections made, the broken people who find nurturing.
These pieces, together with the autobiographical reflections by people who have known St Mary's, suggest why and how the St Mary's congregation will survive its separation from the Brisbane Catholic church.
The large themes of the story bear wider reflection. Most contributors emphasise the importance of the congregation, expressing disappointment and surprise that it was not consulted during the conflict. This suggests disconnection between the inclusive and self-effacing leadership offered to the community by its two priests, and the place in the Catholic Tradition of the priest as teacher and as responsible to the Bishop for his community.
There may also be a larger tension between the Australian preference for association between equals and the hierarchical structures of the Catholic church. This tension expresses itself occasionally in conflict of the kind experienced at St Mary's but more often in the quiet withdrawal from the Catholic Church by people who identify it with authoritarian ways of relating.
Many contributors also express outrage that blow-ins who came to St Mary's to tape sermons, photograph ceremonies, and denounce it to the Archbishop and to the Vatican were given credit by Church authorities. They see this as noxious as welcoming blowflies to Christmas dinner. Certainly, it is hard to imagine anything more alienating to its members than a school, a society or a church that encourages tell-tales and snitches.
But the contributors return to the break between the St Mary's community and the Brisbane Catholic Church. Much of the comment deals with the underlying tension between the inclusiveness of the community worship and its symbols and the insistence by the Archbishop on the universal symbols of the Catholic Church. I found myself most exercised personally by this question.
I take it as axiomatic that Christian communities should offer hospitality to the hesitant, doubtful, searching and disconcerted. That is a Christian ideal, and also reflects life in any congregation and seasons in the life of most Christians. Congregations that claim to be models of untroubled faith and Christian living simply suffer from lack of self-knowledge.
The merit of St Mary's is that the diversity of the congregation is evident, and that its welcome to those on the margins of the Catholic Church is explicit and is honoured in its practice as well as in its rhetoric. That is why the separation is such a loss for the Brisbane Catholic Church. If one of the traditional identifying qualities of the Catholic Church is holiness, and if energetic and visible reaching out to marginalised people is an essential expression of holiness, to lose people who offer such a conspicuous example of it is to lose much.
The question the book leaves me with is not about the inclusiveness of the community, but about what people are included into. In my understanding, at the heart of Catholic faith has been the conviction that God has acted decisively for all human beings in the life, death and rising of Jesus Christ. The implications of this faith have been spelled out in summary form in the claim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that God is trinity.
This fundamental belief shapes relationships in the Church and its teaching. It is expressed through symbols of faith in the church. The language of liturgy and the ways of praying provide a matrix within which doubt, hesitation, wonderment and disconcertment can be held. The shared symbols allow a proper tension between what is received and what is individually believed, lived and struggled with.
The reflections in this book generally focus on the tension between these symbols and creeds, and the belief of individuals or the demands of modernity. That in itself is unproblematic. Peter Kennedy himself wants to preserve a proper silence about God and to insist on the limitations of words and language.
But in the reflections that insist on the need for new words, for respect for the mystery of God, it was not clear whether the decisive investment of God in the life of Jesus Christ was an event for which new words needed to be found, or was part of the old words that needed to be superseded. I did not find any clear assertion that in Jesus Christ God has spoken a decisive word into silence, and that this is the heart of Christian faith.
A large question to be left with. And that is the significance of the dispute and the merit of this book.

Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He also teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.

 Science & Soul by Charles Birch
UNSW Press, 2008, ISBN 9780868409580.
196 pp, rrp $34.95.

Reviewed by Arthur Grimshaw
This is a timely and important publication revealing the inner motivation and inspiration of one of Australia’s most notable thinkers in recent times. Charles Birch has been an inspiration to his students and contemporaries not only in the field of biology and ecology, but has matched this passion with his search for an understanding of both science and religion culminating in a synthesis which he calls ‘an ecological model of God’.
Professor Birch takes us on a journey through the major influences on his thoughts and developments, in an ordered progression. Each chapter brings before the reader eminent thinkers of the past century, gathering them into convenient groupings identified in the chapter headings as Evolutionary Biologists, Animal Ecologists, Philosophers of Religion, and touchstone figures in the world of Science and Religion - leading to Birch’s statements of his own philosophy of life under the headings Pansubjectivism and Panentheism.
 On page 64 Birch comments: “We need help to fit the various elements of our lives into a consistent meaning. Science and Religion are two critical elements”. This leads into his encounters with a group of eminent thinkers who have helped the author develop his own synthesis and philosophy. Such a diverse stream of influences makes for illuminating reading, and for this alone Birch’s book is worth a priority space in our reading.
This may seem at a glance to be a somewhat indigestible stream of contacts - but take heart: the journey is made with a clarity of expression and a genuine passion for truth, which carries us along as if fellow travellers with Charles Birch, discovering new and old truths shaped into an exposition of the unique nature of his understanding of both science and religion.
Rachael Kohn’s foreword is a helpful and insightful response to the journey of Birch’s thought and his fellow travellers along the way, especially for readers whose own disciplines have taken a different route.
A striking feature in Birch’s thought is the place he gives to subjective feelings – and this underpins many of the insights which he illustrates with references to poetic and biblical expressions which will resonate with many readers’ own experience.
The Very Revd Arthur Grimshaw is Dean Emeritus of Brisbane Cathedral.


"The Vanishing Face of Gaia"

James Lovelock's latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Allen Lane, 192pp; $29.95), has an important message. In a few years, or a few decades at most, abrupt changes in Earth's climate will begin, which will end up killing almost all of us and cause the extinction of almost all life on Earth. The tropics and subtropics will be rendered uninhabitable by this shift, and the few survivors will cling to favoured regions such as Britain and New Zealand. Lovelock believes there is little we can do to avert our fate, for the causes of the climatic shift are now so entrenched that they are in all likelihood irreversible. In his view the best we can hope for is personal survival in a world of warring nations or, if we are particularly unfortunate, a world ruled by warlords.

Apocalyptic visions such as this are usually the province of doomsday cults or writers of science fiction. It's unusual to find a scientist advancing one. Yet James Lovelock's scientific credentials are impeccable. Over a long career he's made many discoveries of global significance, including the fact that cold and flu viruses are transmitted by physical contact rather than through the air, and that small mammals such as hamsters can be frozen solid for hours or days, then defrosted and returned to life. As a maker of scientific instruments, he is without peer. One of his instruments used to measure air pollution is still in widespread use today; indeed it made detection of the hole in the ozone layer possible. Lovelock's reputation as one of the world's most respected scientists was reinforced in 2006, when he received the Royal Geological Society's Wollaston medal. It's the highest commendation given in geology, and its previous recipients include Louis Agassiz (the discoverer of the ice age) and Charles Darwin.

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