Welcome back to our new look Anglican home page!

For this month we focus on the new book by Archbishop Rowan Williams, a look at his time as Archbishop, a book for advent and a book to help with Year B of the lectionary.

The first title featured is GAZING ON THE GOSPELS Year B by Judith Dimond. In this book the advice to gaze on the gospels from St Clare of Assisi provides the key to unlocking the door to the heart of Jesus' teaching. Her words provide a pattern of meditation that brings alive the Gospel reading for every Sunday in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary. These short reflections will engage your imagination, mind and heart. Each one concludes with a brief prayer that focuses on helping you to imitate Christ in your everyday life. These meditations provide a lively, different and accessible way to immerse yourself in the Gospel throughout the year.

The second book is MEANING IS IN THE WAITING by Paula Gooder. This is the first in a series of books commissioned in consultation with John Sentamu, it can be described as 'The Archbishop of York's Advent book'. Its theme is overtly an Advent one, yet subsequent books will range over other biblical and seasonal topics. Paula Gooder provides a profoundly biblical guide to the season of Advent exploring its central theme of waiting (something we are not good at in our modern culture) in the company of the biblical characters who feature prominently in the lectionary readings for the season: Abraham and Sarah who waited for a child; Isaiah and the prophets who waited for judgement and redemption; John the Baptist whose role was to wait in the wilderness until the prophecies he foretold were realized and Mary whose waiting began in pregnancy and continued as she stood at the foot of the cross.
Arranged for daily reading this offers an exquisite meditation on the spirituality of waiting as a way of enhancing our lives and bringing us closer to God.

The third book we feature is a new work by the Archbishop of Canterbury, DOSTOEVSKY by Rowan Williams. An extraordinary book, which through the lens of Dostoevsky's novels enables the reader to consider the nature of God in the 21st Century - a societal landscape fraught with tensions and social inequalities. The current rash of books hostile to religious faith will one day be an interesting subject for some sociological analysis. But to counter such work, is a book of the profoundest kind about the nature and purpose of religious belief. Terrorism, child abuse, absent fathers and the fragmentation of the family, the secularisation and the sexualisation of culture, the future of liberal democracy, the clash of cultures and the nature of national identity - so many of the anxieties that we think of as being quintessentially features of the early twenty first century are present in the work of Dostoevsky - in his letters, his journalism and above all in his fiction.

The final book is by Rupert Shortt called ROWAN’S RULE; this is the first authorized biography of the current Archbishop and offers a fascinating insight into the life of the leader of the Anglican Communion.