A Little Summer Reading

One of the things I love about summer is the opportunity afforded by the slightly quieter pace to tackle the pile of reading that’s been growing on my desk over the last year. Having a seven-week old baby puts a cramp on the quiet reading time, but here are a few of the things I’ve managed to get my teeth into in the past few weeks. There are some great books here: do check a few of them out.

The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist

TAWDEcover

“A breath, a gust, a positive whoosh of fresh air. Made me laugh, made me think, made me cry.” — Adrian Plass

In the last decade, atheism has leapt from obscurity to the front pages: producing best- selling books, making movies, and plastering adverts on the side of buses. There’s an energy and a confidence to contemporary atheism: many people now assume that a godless scepticism is the default position, indeed the only position for anybody wishing to appear educated, contemporary, and urbane. Atheism is hip, religion is boring.

Shining Like Stars

I recall with clarity a night a few years ago when my wife and  I were on vacation in southern California. We’d spent the day hiking in the mountains and, in the afternoon, had descended to explore the mysterious and ancient landscape of Mono Lake—one of the oldest lakes in North America. Pinned to the information board by the parking lot was a sign advertising a talk by a Park Ranger that evening: “Stars over Mono Lake”. And so it was, at 9pm, we found ourselves lying on the ancient sands, looking up a night sky in which a million points of light glowed with an intensity I’d never seen before. The air was cold and clear, the hauntingly beautiful desert silence broken only by the occasional howl of a lonely coyote, cry of an insomniac gull, or scream for help of a distant and woefully lost tourist.