Tim Vivian

Balance of the Heart

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“Farag is correct when she says that through 'presentation of the inner spiritual experience of the desert fathers and mothers the reader will discover they are closer to us than we think.' The great virtue of The Balance of the Heart is how Farag focuses our attention on the ipsissima verba, the very words, of the desert mothers and fathers. Early monastic spirituality is alive and well, and even life-changing, in this book. I highly recommend it.”

Ministry Matters

Church Leadership & Ministry

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)

Searching for Nova Albion

Arts & Literature

“To read Pamela Cranston’s poems, as with all good poetry, is to be alive. Cranston offers us in Searching for Nova Albion, poem by poem, a guided tour of the spiritual life—that is, how to see, be in, the world spiritually. The back of the book tells us that Cranston “aspires to follow” in the “footsteps as a fellow poet-priest” of such luminaries as George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, R. S. Thomas, David Scott, and Rowan Williams. One could suppose that the statement above is overreaching, but such a supposition would be incorrect. Cranston speaks to us, just John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Denise Levertov (the first two Anglican, the last Roman Catholic), and others can still inform our lives. I hope that Cranston’s publisher will nominate her book for poetry prizes. I’m not optimistic how a faith-based book of poems will fare these days, but the venture will be worth the sailing.”

The House of Metaphor

Arts & Literature

“Although she will deny it, Pamela Cranston is a mystic. For me, a mystic is someone who sees surfaces as rubble to dig through to find the truth, or truths, someone deeply in touch with depth(s), not just an onlooker, or even surveyor, but an inhabitant of what is most true, hence sacred. As someone who often finds it difficult to find light, I celebrate the luminescence of the poems in The House of Metaphor.”