It’s important to give time and space for books that are controversial and thought-provoking. Both the reviews below concern writers who have challenged some well-established theological assumptions, offering different lenses through which we might view religious texts. Julie Grove has clearly relished John Shelby Spong’s possibly provocative thesis that the Gospels should be viewed as Jewish/Early Christian liturgical texts that are grounded in Judaism, a response to fundamentalist interpretations that fail to recognise the Jewishness of Jesus. I have chosen to travel back to Mediaeval East Anglia and review a book by Janina Ramirez that brings a feminist gaze to the life and spiritual reflections of the fourteenth-century Christian mystic and writer Julian of Norwich.
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