Author: Alan Everett
ISBN: 978-1-78622-052-3
Price: £12.99
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Year: 2018
Publisher: Canterbury Press

For many years the churches in the Notting Hill area of west London have provided a model for practical and deep ecumenism. Much of this was grounded in the active Christian engagement with the Notting Hill Carnival and its witness for an inclusive and diverse society, associated with well known clergy in various churches such as Michael Hollings, Oliver McTernan and David Randall. The strength of this sustained witness was shown after 14 June 2017 when a terrible fire destroyed Grenfell Tower in the area, killing 72 people and leading to many families being made homeless. This book has been written by Fr Alan Everett, Vicar of St Clements Notting Dale, a church very near the tower which was kept open from the night of the disaster as a place of refuge for survivors and those trying to help people in the tower.

Author: John Henry Newman
Edited with an Introduction, Notes, and Textual Appendices by James Tolhurst
ISBN: 978-1-78182-012-4
Price: £35.00
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Year: 2018
Publisher: Gracewing

Newman described his Essay on Development as ‘an hypothesis to account for a difficulty’. The difficulty was the quandary in which he had found himself. After years as a leader of the Oxford Movement, seeking to revive the Catholic tradition within the Church of England by arguing that Anglicanism was a middle way between Roman excess and Protestant error, he had been struck by doubt. While studying the Church Fathers, he found that the precedents for such a position were not encouraging. On the contrary, he felt that earlier attempts at such a middle way like Monophysitism and Semi-Arianism had not trodden a path between extremes, but had rather been compromises with heresy, Eutychianism and Arianism respectively, compromises that had themselves been judged to be heretical.

Author: Terrence C Wright
ISBN: 978-1-62164-157-5
Price: £12.00
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Year: 2018
Publisher: Ignatius

Reviews in this journal in the past have reflected on the importance and divisiveness of the Servant of God Dorothy Day, founder of Catholic Worker communities and newspaper in the United States in the 1930s. Day’s unconditional witness for the poor and her absolute pacifism have made her a contested figure in American society and in the American Church. The Archdiocese of New York is pursuing a cause for her beatification and in the nearly forty years since her death it is good to know that studies of her life and influence continue to flourish, and not simply within the communities which she founded and inspired.

Authors: Will Hutton and Andrew Adonis
ISBN: 978-1-40871-122-4
Price: £8.99
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Year: 2018
Publisher: Abacus

We are still waiting in this country for a sustained theological response from the churches to the EU Referendum in 2016. Having been able to say rather little during the campaign, and conscious of divisions within their ranks (it seems, for example, that a majority of practising Anglicans voted for Leave), silence has seemed to be the easiest course, except in relation to the disturbing rise in ‘hate crime’ attacks since the vote, particularly in the early months of the summer of 2016. When such a response comes to be written it will be important for Christian leaders, hopefully enlightened by Catholic Social Teaching, to be attentive to prophetic voices outside our own communities who have challenged the Leave campaign’s victory and its premises. One such challenge has been issued in this short pithy book by the economist Will Hutton and the former Labour government minister Andrew Adonis.