Harry Williams' True Resurrection (1972/2000) was notably honest for its day. Williams joined insights from Eastern Orthodoxy together with his hard-won perceptions of himself to embrace what it meant for him personally to be 'image of God' , created, re-ordered and 'graced' - with a lot of laughter. Ordained, he eventually became an priest member of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Yorkshire.
Kenneth Stevenson's Rooted in Detachment: Living the Transfiguration (2007) was written whilst he was still Bishop of Portsmouth, out of his experience of treatment for acute myeloid leukaemia. Reflection on the 'Transfiguration' of Christ is a central feature of Eastern Orthodoxy, and most important for generating the possibility of seeing life differently, no matter what the threats to us may be.
Michael Ramsey ended up as Archbishop of Canterbury after being Bishop of Durham and then Archbishop of York. He lived through one of the most turbulent eras of changes in Parliamentary legislation, participating in important debates as a member of the House of Lords- anything but isolated from the politics of his day. One of his books recently re-published is called simply Holy Spirit (1977/2010), a biblical study from someone who knew why understanding such belief really mattered.
Rowan Williams currently endures the miseries of being Archbishop of Canterbury in very difficult times. He never loses sight of what will sustain him in his office, as, for instance, Silence and Honey Cakes: the Wisdom of the Desert (2003) which draws on the stories written down recording the teaching of some of the 'fathers' and 'mothers' of the 45h-5th centuries AD, surprisingly provocative and interesting even for our own very different times.
And finally, you may be interested in two of David Brown's SHORT books. The Word to Set You Free: Living Faith and Biblical Criticism (1995) shows how some work in the 'study' can bear fruit in the 'pulpit'- or just when reading the Bible! His collection Through the Eyes of the Saints: A Pilgrimage Through History (2005) shows just how weird as well as fascinating as human beings some of the 'saints' were. And 'saints' refers not just to figures in the remote past, but to some very recent and controversial figures, and not just to 'Anglicans'!
Ann Loades
August 2010