Books by contributors

Two CEN contributors have just published new books. Liz Hoare (tutor in spiritual formation at Wycliffe Hall) has written Using the Bible in Spiritual Direction, in which she encourages her readers to place the scriptures at the centre of their spiritual quest and makes it clear that spiritual direction is not a self-improvement plan, psychotherapy or counselling. One reviewer has called it a ‘remarkable book’. Also remarkable in many ways is Peter Mullen’s autobiographical work, Always a Priest. This is full of amusing and also revealing stories of Mullen’s time as a curate in several parishes, his chaplaincy of a secondar y school in Bolton and his period as Vicar of two countr y parishes in Yorkshire. He doesn’t take the stor y down to his time in the City of London and his remarkable preaching ministr y there. The writing is always vivid and down to earth. Don’t pick this book up if the ‘f’ word offends you! As might be expected, the hierarchy doesn’t come out very well. We are told that ‘Archbishop Ramsey had an overblown reputation as a theologian, largely created by sycophantic mediocrities looking for preferment’ and there is an account of Archbishop John Habgood carpeting Mullen for writing an article critical of the Archbishop’s support for research on embr yos. ‘He wore expediency like a shroud,’ Mullen writes. By contrast 86-year-old housebound Louise Fawcett, to whom Mullen as a young curate took communion, was the next best thing to a vision of the supernatural or transport of heavenly delight. In different ways, both books are a good read.