Lee Cerling

Delightful book, delightfully read

Revisado: 07-04-22

I grew up with this book on the family bookshelf, but it never occurred to me to read it until my 18-year old son told me that his girlfriend loved it. I had no idea of what it was about or its history, but it seemed intriguing, so I gave it a listen.

What a delightful surprise! Using the allegorical technique of John Bunyan in *Pilgrim’s Progress*, (not as well as Bunyan; but still, very well done), Hannah Hurnard writes a largely autobiographical story of how she went from a place of crippling fearfulness and stammering speech, and complete distrust of God, to a place that can only be described as a place of rapturous joy and faith in God.

She tells the story of herself, whom she names Much Afraid, a girl with crippled feet and a crooked mouth, living in the Valley of Despair in a large family of Fearings. She is called by a wonderful Shepherd who comes to the valley to ascend to the heights, a place where, she is promised, she will be given “hind’s feet” and a healed mouth, and so be able to skip and dance and live joyfully on the beautiful mountain heights.

As can be imagined, there are many obstacles and confusions and setbacks along the way, but all of these work to shape and form her into the beautiful creature of God that she was designed and intended to be.

The book was a great bestseller; and she became very well known in conservative Christian circles, but was later shunned because of her eventual belief in Christian Universalism—the belief that all people will be saved in the end.

Regardless of this, hers is a voice that deserves to be heard, and listenend to respectfully. She comes off to me as a kind of combination of St. Catherine of Sienna (“And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and every manner of thing shall be well”), St. Francis of Assisi (with his “brother sun and sister moon,” and his belief that all of the natural world speaks out the glory of God), and the medieval monk, Bernard of Clairvaux (who championed an understanding of God as the deep relationship of joyful, even ecstatic, love that is depicted in Song of Solomon).

She was a Quaker, and this is surely a source of her powerful inwardness, and confidence to address and teach others about the Christian life as a woman of little means or much theological training. But, from my perspective, being a Quaker also contributes to the only real weakness of the book (a weakness also reflected in *Pilgrim’s Progress*), which is that it is so focuses on the individual’s pilgrimage of faith that it fails to situate the life of the believer within the wider and deeper stream of the life of Christ’s Church.

Still, there is a great deal to be learned by listening to Hannah Hurnard’s voice, especially with respect to growing in humility, and faithful obedience; and in learning how to see the natural world—the mountains and flowers and flowing streams—through the eyes of a vibrant, living faith.

And finally: the reading is performed by Nadia May; a wonderful choice for this book. Nadia reads with great respect for the text, and is delightful to listen to.

Highly recommend the book for many different kinds of readers: young and old; people new to Christian faith or older believers seeking refreshment of their own spiritual wells; or for those wondering about how, in an age of deep and even hostile secularism, a person might possibly develop a living, vibrant faith of their own.

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CS Lewis on steroids

Revisado: 04-27-19

I think no one will ever accuse the polymath David Hart of “wearing his learning lightly.” He eschews the avuncular, amiable polemical style adopted by C.S. Lewis; he prefers the pugilistic style of someone like the late Christopher Hitchens. But he knows far more than Hitchens ever knew, both in scholarly depth and breadth; and he employs his mind, as did Lewis, to the vigorous presentation of an intellectually robust, classical theism—not merely a Christian theism, but one that he sees as shared by all of the major theistic traditions, both East and West. His willingness to incorporate Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and other non-Western conceptions of God will alarm traditional Christian theists, but his aim in this book is not to defend Christian theism; rather, his aim is to demolish the trivial, ignorant, and superficial conceptions of God that “the New Atheists” regularly invoke when they make their anti-theistic arguments. Although he has done this elsewhere, as for example in his equally satisfying demolition of “the New Atheist” view of Western church history in his book *Atheist Delusions*, this is Hart’s fullest response to the theological misunderstandings of Richard Dawkins, et. al. Overall, a very enjoyable book, though it is likely to be somewhat opaque to those who have not previously been exposed to philosophical thought about Being and non-being.

And I should add that Tom Pile’s reading of the book was fantastic. I was worried that whoever read this book would make a mess of it; but I came away thinking that the hubristic edge that often characterizes David Hart’s writing was considerably softened by Tom Pile’s reading, and the overall effect was probably that of improvement.

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Fantastic Reading!

Revisado: 02-08-18

I tried to read PL in college—even had a course on it—and I just couldn’t get into it. I realize now that it was because I couldn’t imagine a good narrative voice to read it in. This narrator, Charlton Griffin, has done the world a wonderful service with his beautiful, thought-full voicing of this classic meditation on what was going on behind the scenes of Genesis 1-3. I’m grateful to him for his reading. Although the language of Milton will be inaccessible to those unfamiliar with language like Shakespearean English, Griffin “performs” Paradise Lost like a play, so that if you can follow a performance of Shakespeare, you will be able to follow PL, even if you have no prior familiarity with it. In any event, Griffin is such a fantastic reader that I am going to actively seek out and buy books that he has read due to his tremendous skill as a reader.

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Masterful Survey of von Balthasar

Revisado: 01-13-18

Balthasar is a rich and rewarding theologian, but his works run many thousands of pages, and it can be difficult to enter into the richness of his thought. This is a wonderful introduction to his work that is appropriate for advanced undergraduates or seminarians.

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Masterful reading of a great work

Revisado: 01-01-18

The genius of Dostoevsky is on full display in this novel.

The BK is a masterful story, plumbing the depths of human psychology long before Freud started writing about psychology. This book was loved and admired by Einstein, Wittgenstein, Freud, Leo Tolstoy, and Pope Benedict XVI, among others. It is a survey of both the human soul and the Russian soul; and the subtlety with which the human spirit is examined is dizzingly complex. It draws heavily on the insights of 1800 years of Orthodox Christian spirituality, and is a profoundly Christian novel, similar in spirit to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

The demands on the (oral) reader are tremendous, and at first, I wasn’t sure I cared for the narrator’s voicing. But as the story went on, I came to feel that Alastair Cameron did a wonderful job, because the book consists of many strong characters, in constant dialogue, and his reading did a great deal to keep the characters clear for the listener. Readers and listeners owe Cameron, and the translator, Constance Garnett, a great debt of gratitude.

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