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by
18 October 2024

This week’s selection: a new religious metaphysics; Tom Wright’s crash course on Acts; and novelistic representations of sainthood

Aspects of Truth: A new religious metaphysics by Catherine Pickstock (Cambridge University Press, £24.99 (£22.49); 978-1-108-79448-0). New in paperback

“What is ‘truth’? The question that Pilate put to Jesus was laced with dramatic irony. But at a time when what is true and what is untrue have acquired a new currency, the question remains of crucial significance. Is truth a matter of the representation of things which lack truth in themselves? Or of mere coherence? Or is truth a convenient if redundant way of indicating how one's language refers to things outside oneself? In her ambitious new book, Catherine Pickstock addresses these profound questions, arguing that epistemological approaches to truth either fail argumentatively or else offer only vacuity. She advances instead a bold metaphysical and realist appraisal which overcomes the Kantian impasse of ‘subjective knowing’ and ban on reaching beyond supposedly finite limits. Her book contends that in the end truth cannot be separated from the transcendent reality of the thinking soul.

The Challenge of Acts: A crash course on the book of Acts and its relevance for Christianity and culture today by Tom Wright (SPCK, £13.99 (£12.59); 978-0-281-09058-7).

“This book offers a brief, clear and incisive introduction to the Acts of the Apostles. Acts is a substantial book, sitting right in the middle of the New Testament, looking back to the four Gospels and on to the mission of the early churches. It provides a framework for our understanding of the New Testament letters. It also shows us what it means to think of the gospel of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, going out into the world over which Israel’s Messiah claims the status of Lord. Tom Wright explains how this meant confronting the wider culture of the Greek and Roman world, as well as the culture of the Jewish world. All of this is to be found in Acts, providing much food for thought as we ourselves face new questions about gospel and culture in our own day.” 

Sublime Virtue: ‘Sainthood’, as rendered problematic by a dozen novelists by Andrew Shanks (DLT, £16.99 (£15.29); 978-1-915412-28-7).

“What might a notion of ‘sainthood’ look like, radically purged of any spirit of propagandist church ideology? In Sublime Virtue, theologian Andrew Shanks demonstrates a vibrant new approach to investigating this question by analysing representations of sainthood in the work of twelve novelists — a ‘secular canon’, divested of the unhelpful trappings of institutional religious culture and tradition.”

Selected by Frank Nugent, of the Church House Bookshop, which operates the Church Times Bookshop.

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