bookishpriest's reviews
200 reviews

The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why by Phyllis Tickle

informative reflective fast-paced

3.5

This book attracted a huge amount of attention when it was published in 2008. Its comments about the Church’s cycle of “great rummage sales” is still one of the most frequently quoted ideas I hear in conversations about church change. This idea appears in the very first pages of the book and seems to be an earworm of an idea for many readers. (The rummage sale idea actually came from the Rt Revd Mark Dyer, which Tickle is very clear about, but this book gets the credit more often than not.) So, for a book that dominated conversation 15 years ago, how do the ideas hold up?

Tickle does a great job of tracing, with very broad strokes, the development of the Church over the past 2,000 years. She points out the times of greatest turmoil and change, which do seem to come in roughly 500 year cycles. She offers several thoroughly modern models for thinking about this process of change and, in the last third of the book, applies these models to make some guesses at where our current period of Church change might take us.

One of the troubles when painting with broad strokes is that details sometimes get lost. There are several historical references in the book that either need more time or, in 2024, seem like glaring omissions. For example, Tickle refers to the influence of the printing press and the Reformations of the Early Modern era as the cause of the spread of Christianity around the world with unprecedented enthusiasm. No mention is offered of imperialism, colonial projects, and the role that the Church’s addiction to the power of empire played. Also curious is Tickle’s repeated observation that the Church is reshaping itself to contend with a postmodern world, but then using entirely modern forms of analysis and description to try and predict what will happen next. One must use the tools available and I have the benefit of 15 years of hindsight since the book’s publication, but this felt like an awkward approach as I was reading.

Much of the conversation about Emergent and Emerging church movements has fallen by the wayside in 2024. There are other books and articles which cover why and how that has happened. The writing in The Great Emergence is accessible and introduces historical patterns in the Church and several important theological concepts. It’s a short book (about 165 pages) with plenty of questions for thought/discussion at the end and some suggested further reading. I think it could make a good introduction to the historic patterns of change in the Church and some of the broad differences between various groups of Christians. I would definitely recommend further reading on all of the topics introduced here to fill in some of the missing details. Though, I suppose I always recommend further reading on every subject, so that’s nothing new.

The Great Emergence is worth a look but is very much a product of its time and the front-burner ideas about Church in the early 2000s and needs to be read with those grains of salt ready to hand.

Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira

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5.0

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

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adventurous dark funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

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adventurous medium-paced

3.5

Similar themes and overall cozy, good-humoured feel to the well-known Legends & Lattes by the same author.

This book is cute and enjoyable but doesn't have the same degree of enchanting energy as the previous. Bookshops & Bonedust felt a bit slow in the middle and some of the relationships were obvious from the outset and a little forced, even knowing there'd be romance going in.

Worth a read, but if you've only got room for one of the duology, the first book is a better place to spend your reading hours!

Stuff Me by Joe Satoria

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2.0

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The Other Face of God: When the Stranger Calls Us Home by Mary Jo Leddy

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

Supporting and working with refugees in Canada's largest city might seem, at first glance, to be a one-way street. The privileged local, acting out of charity, assists and supports newcomers to Canada who have left behind almost their entire lives in hopes of something better here. Mary Jo Leddy, after 20 years at Romero House in Toronto, shares, through memories, reflection, and anecdotes, that the experience of refugee support is life-changing for both the helper and the helped.

With a focus on grace and mercy, Leddy describes how her encounters with refugees building new lives in Canada challenged philosophies of imperialism, xenophobia, and selfishness. They also revealed depths of faith and the abundance of God's love in the world.

High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson

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funny lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

This novella is a satirical, stoner-buddies take on Brexit and those ideas are certainly present. In a world where men are absent and the fate of humanity is being debated in a perpetually-hung parliament, Lana is caught up in her new role as a parliamentary scribe with a difficult fairy taskmaster. The drugs flow freely and Sapphic romance abounds, including a complicated love triangle.

Unfortunately, in spite of an interesting premise and some genuinely funny world-building, this novella just didn't do it for me. I wasn't especially invested in the characters or what seemed a very perfunctory plot. A neat idea that came out as uninteresting. I'm not sure if this needed to be a whole novel or a short story, or something else, but this wasn't quite it.

Content Warnings