Author: James Woodward

Sir Terry Frost  RA (13 October 1915 – 1 September 2003) - playful, alive, colourful & fun I cannot now remember when I first encountered a piece of art by Frost. I do remember the vibrancy of the colour and the freedom of the form. Here - I sensed - was energy an

Engaging, wise, passionate This is an appealing and fluent book with a story and a purpose. I read it in one siting on a train from Durham to London and as I passed through York (just under half way through the book) I felt a deep sense of gratitude for the 98th Archbishop

Most of us live ordinary lives making the best of time and circumstance. We do our best. We sometimes fail. We deal with whatever the days of work bring. We dream. We hope. We cry. We wonder about roads not taken. We (mostly) do our best. We look forward to holidays and try

irrepressible, honest, real I have recently invested in a Kindle as part of an aspiration to travel a bit more lightly. The conversion will take some time but here is the first marker - this memoir is the first that I have read on the 'neat' and 'light' tablet. A great start

I have had a busy week at Sarum College catching up with students, moderating assignments, a meeting of my body of Trustees as well as the usual range of unpredictable listening, mediating and resolving. Not all questions or difficulties move too quickly into the resolving z

by Brent Peery, London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2021, 121 pp., £18.99 (PBK), ISBN 9781785926822 This is a well-researched, grounded, and passionate text that makes a persuasive case for Outcome Oriented Chaplaincy (OOC). This process embraces a methodology of care

Bird by Bird : Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott Google informs me that around 4,500 books are published each day across the world. This is daunting, by any account, for both reader and writer! How do we make what we write count, be read and make any kind o

Honest Sadness Lament in a Pandemic Age John Holdsworth Sacristy Press 2021 Many of my friends have commented on their weariness with these weeks of lockdown. Government heralds progress with statistics about vaccinations delivered and the reducing infection numbers - and

What Does Jeremy Think? Jeremy Heywood and the Making of Modern Britain, by Suzanne Heywood (Collins 2021) Jeremy Heywood, senior civil servant, 1961-2018  In these days of zoom TV interviews it is not unusual to see the learned and powerful sitting in front of (u

The Power of Ritual : Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices Casper Ter Kuile William Collins 2020 Casper Ter Kuile I am indebted to my friend Jane Shaw for pointing me in the direction of this rather stimulating and wonderful book. It came out of a conversat

Finishing Well - A God's Eye view of Ageing by Ian Knox ( SPCK 2020) Ian Knox is an experienced, wise, creative priest and evangelist. His love of people, of life, of Scripture and learning are all present in the fourteen chapters of this book. His scope of reading and listen

More than 80 years ago, in Greece, 60 thousand Jews lived peacefully in Thessaloniki. It was a vibrant and valuable community, with most of these Jews working in the port. So much so that the port of Thessaloniki was even closed on Saturday, Shabbat. The Jewish Community at T

 Sacristy Press 2020 (207 pages) 978-1-78959-142-2 £14.99 Sacristy Press has established itself as an innovative publishing house with a diverse, engaging and ground breaking list. Natalie Watson, Richard Hilton, Eric Sharman and Thomas Ball are a strong team. This boo

Jessica Kingsley 2020 This is a book that has taken a long time in the reading. Why? It is so rich, so searching, so challenging that I had to keep putting it down to ingest the questions, stories and wisdom that is captured so simply in these eight chapters. A phrase here, a

Nothing much stands still these days except perhaps weekends in Lockdown. I have been to Church (online of course) and my usual catch up with friends or trip out of Salisbury have been properly curtailed. The opportunity to catch up on some reading before my mandatory exerc