Good Year

How can we enter fruitfully into the seasons of the Church’s year? Why have the seasons become shaped as they have and what can we do to make them good?As Mark Oakley explains in the hugely enjoyable, earthy and wide-ranging introduction to this exceptional volume, we can experience them in stimulating company! Here are reflections by the most senior pastors and teachers in the Church today:SARAH MULLALLY, Bishop of Crediton, on A Good Advent, a season ‘pregnant with hope’, when our waiting is anything but inactive.ROWAN WILLIAMS, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, on A Good Christmas, and the overwhelming surprise of ‘a God who values our humanity beyond all imagining’.LIBBY LANE, Bishop of Stockport, on A Good Epiphany, when through discomfort ‘we begin to discover at first hand the hospitality of God’.JUSTIN WELBY, Archbishop of Canterbury, on A Good Lent, ‘which takes hold of human sinfulness and, in an extraordinary way, makes space for the hope of Christ’.STEPHEN COTTRELL, Bishop of Chelmsford, on A Good Holy Week, when we ‘revel in the sensuous and very hands-on re-enactment of liturgical drama’.STEPHEN CONWAY, Bishop of Ely, on A Good Easter, which is ‘life lived shot through with grace and glory’.KAREN GORHAM, Bishop of Sherborne, on A Good Pentecost, when our life’s journey ‘brings us encounters, challenges and opportunities we can rise to, equipped by the Spirit of God’.

A good read.

Edited by Mark Oakley, Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral and author of Collage of God, Readings for Weddings, Readings for Funerals (all SPCK) and The Splash of Words (Canterbury Press, 2016).