Gerard Loughlin

Exploring Doubt

Christian Living

“John Henry Newman once sought to comfort a bereaved friend by noting how the dead can seem more real to us than when they were alive, more present in their absence than when in the flesh. This apparent paradox – of presence in absence – is the theme of Alex Wright’s remarkable book. It is a book of bereavements, personal and cultural. Wright weaves together a set of reflections on the loss and remaining of faith in our times with the loss of his first marriage, setting both in the landscape – the seascape – of the North Norfolk coast. For it was there that his marriage both flowered and faded, in a place where the distinction between land and sea is both lost and remembered in the ceaseless flow of the tides. There is a revelation in the sea’s withdrawing, a renewal in the passing of relationships, and it is the finding of such returns that Wright’s book delivers: a calm, cultured, beguiling – if sometimes unsettling – meditation that will resonate with many, in many different ways. A wonderful and profound book.”

Kenosis and Priesthood

Church Leadership & Ministry

“T. D. Herbert offers a passionate and detailed argument for why priesthood is an appropriate form of Christian ministry, and why such ministry is appropriately kenotic. The priest participates in the Trinitarian kenosis by which, without mixture or confusion, the divine becomes human. Drawing on narrative theology, Herbert contends for a critically realistic understanding of theological language, for analogy as alone appropriate to the mystery of God's condescension, Herbert gives us much to think about.”

Zizek

Philosophy

“With clarity and humor, and in wonderfully short compass, Marcus Pound introduces the thought of not only Slavoj Žižek but also his guru, Jacques Lacan. Pound finds in these masters of inversion a profound anti-theology that only needs to become more theological — more orthodox — in order to work, to rid us of complacency. This is a book for those new to Žižek and for those who, knowing him already, want to know him newly — as the theologian he might almost be. It's as enjoyable as reading Žižek himself.”