Elaine Pagels “sees in gnosticism a ‘powerful alternative to…orthodox Christian tradition,’ an alternative she clearly finds attractive,” a Kirkus Reviews’ critic writes about her book, The Gnostic Gospels. Trouble is, “gnostic tenets were repressed by mainstream Christianity because, Pagels claims, they constituted a political threat to the [church] hierarchy.” In The Guardian, the former archbishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway concurs: “…scholars like […]

“Ripped from the headlines,” the saying goes.    Perhaps that can be said for what’s now begun in “Library Learnings,” and what will continue right through to year’s end: a series of six interrelated essays about Indigeneity in Canada. After all, does a day go by in which the media don’t report on Indigenous peoples in […]

On a recent Sunday, Chris New, in his preaching, pointed up this book…as well he might. Publishers Weekly calls it “a guidebook for pilgrims on the journey to wholehearted living.” And Niklas Goeke, for the website fourminutebooks.com, where he insists that professor, researcher, and author Brene Brown “never fails to deliver,” calls this the book “that really […]

Historian Diana Butler Bass is unwilling to write off mainline Protestant churches as a lost cause. In fact, after having “done the serious research,” as the Hearts & Minds website puts it, she tells, in her 2004 book, of a transformation going on within at least some congregations: they’re showing, as her publisher, the Alban […]

A “culture of peace” was, in part, the focus of SSUC’s last-of-May Sunday service. It was earlier that month that Canada’s Jean Vanier died; a remembrance in The Globe avowed that his “capacity for human empathy was inexhaustible.” So choosing the luminary’s Finding Peace to be the Library’s Featured Book is altogether rightful. In his 2003 […]