The Air We Breathe by Glen Scrivener

As Pete mentioned on Wednesday, we'll be starting to post book reviews and recommendations from the Elders on the blog. And this is the first one, so welcome!

Pete's first recommendation for the blog is 'The Air We Breathe' by Glen Scrivener and Rory Shiner over on The Gospel Coalition has about the sum of it for why it's great:

The western world’s relationship to the Christian faith is like a celebrity marriage—complicated.
At one level, our culture’s rejection of its ancestral faith has never been so enthusiastic, so complete, so aggressive. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like a divorce of the acrimonious variety. And yet, our world remains so deeply Christian. We continue to use the convictions, the thought-forms, and even the metaphysics of the faith we are so keen to reject. Our apparently self-evident commitments to equality, progress, and compassion are Christian artefacts, even as our relationship with the faith that bequeathed them to us comes unstuck. If these values are Christianity’s children, their paternity is contested—or not even considered but assumed to be from somewhere else. Our collective ignorance of Christianity’s influence is so complete that we don’t even stop to wonder where these values came from. Never having met their parents, we are unable to spot the family resemblance. We imagine these things are just there. Like a fish in water. Like the air we breathe.

If you'd like to read Rory's whole review, you can find it here.