A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness

The great fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea once observed that, in his time, most Christians believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all would eventually attain salvation. But today, this view is no longer prevalent within Christian communities. In this momentous book, David Bentley Hart makes the case that nearly two millennia of dogmatic tradition have misled readers on the crucial matter of universal salvation.

In our increasingly secular world, holy texts are at best seen as irrelevant, and at worst as an excuse to incite violence, hatred and division. So what value, if any, can Scripture hold for us today? And if our world no longer seems compatible with Scripture, is it perhaps because its original purpose has become lost? Today we see the Quran being used by some to justify war and terrorism, the Torah to deny Palestinians the right to live in the Land of Israel, and the Bible to condemn homosexuality and contraception.

How can Christianity touch the imagination of our contemporaries when ever fewer people in the West identify as religious? Timothy Radcliffe argues we must show how everything we believe is an invitation to live fully. God says, ‘I put before you life and death: choose life’. Anyone who understands the beauty and messiness of human life - novelists, poets, filmmakers and so on - can be our allies, whether they believe or not. The challenge is not today’s secularism but its banality.

By the author of The Science Delusion a detailed account of how science can authenticate spirituality. To go beyond is to move into a higher state of consciousness, to a place of bliss, greater understanding, love, and deep connectedness, a realm where we finally find life's meaning - experiences for which all spiritual seekers seek. Dr Rupert Sheldrake, writing as both a scientist and a spiritual explorer, looks at seven spiritual practices that are personally transformative and have scientifically measurable effects. 

We have misunderstood Paul, badly.  We have read his words through our own set of assumptions. We need to begin with Paul’s world view, to see things the way he saw them. What if ‘original sin’ was never part of Paul’s thinking? What if the idea that we are saved by faith in Christ, as Luther argued, was based on a mistranslation of Paul’s words and a misunderstanding of Paul’s thinking?  

David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New Testament in the spirit of "etsi doctrina non daretur", "as if doctrine is not given". Reproducing the texts' often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts' impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening listeners to an uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.

The Bible is the central book in Western culture, yet extraordinarily there is no proper history of it. This exceptional work, by one of the world's leading Biblical scholars, provides a full account of how the different parts of the Bible came to be written; how some writings which were regarded as holy became canonical and were included in the Bible, and others were not; what the relationship is of the different parts of the Bible to each other; and how, once it became a stable text, the Bible has been disseminated and interpreted around the world. 

Full of sensitive pastoral advice and shot through with arresting and illuminating theological insights, Rowan Williams’ new book explores the meaning and practice of four essential components of the Christian life: baptism, Bible, Eucharist and prayer. This book is an invitation to everyone to think through the essentials of the faith and how to live it, making it an ideal gift for anyone at the start of their spiritual journey or thinking about confirmation.

The feminine mystic is one who gathers the pain of the world into her arms and transmutes it with "wild mercy" - a merging of fierce courage with the unstoppable forces of forgiveness, compassion, and love. And she is needed now more than ever. "Women across cultural boundaries are rising with our echoing yes in response to the collective call to step up and repair the broken world", writes Mirabai Starr. With Wild Mercy, Starr inspires you to awaken your own inner mystic as you immerse yourself in the guidance of many sages....

In his devastating new book The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray examines the 21st century’s most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and ‘intersectionality’. We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed.

In the secular, sceptical, post-Christian world of the West, continuing faith in angels is both anomaly and comfort. But what exactly are angels, and why have so many in different times and contexts around the globe believed in them? What is their history and role in the great faiths and beyond their walls? Are angels something real, a manifestation of divine concern? Or part of the poetry of religion? And can they continue to illuminate a deeper truth about human existence and the cosmos? These are not new questions.

By the author of The Science Delusion, a detailed account of how science can authenticate spirituality. In this pioneering audiobook, Rupert Sheldrake shows how science helps validate seven practices on which all religions are built and which are part of our common human heritage. The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically as never before, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier.

In Stop Being Reasonable, philosopher and journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells six lucid, gripping stories that show the limits of human reason. From the woman who realised her husband harboured a terrible secret, to the man who left the cult he had been raised in since birth, and the British reality TV contestant who, having impersonated someone else for a month, discovered he could no longer return to his former identity, all of the people interviewed radically altered their beliefs about the things that matter most. 

Time Lived, Without Its Flow is an astonishing, unflinching essay on the nature of grief from critically acclaimed poet Denise Riley. From the horrific experience of maternal grief Riley wrote her lauded collection Say Something Back, a modern classic of British poetry. This essay is a companion piece to that work, looking at the way time stops when we lose someone suddenly from our lives. 

N.T. Wright's accessible new volume, built on his Cambridge University Hulsean Lectures of 2004, takes a fresh look at Paul in light of recent understandings of his Jewish roots, his attitude toward the Roman Empire, and his unique reframing of Jewish symbols in relation to his experience of the risen Christ. Then Wright attempts a short systematic account of the main theological contours of Paul's thought and its pertinence for the church today.