Part-autobiographical, it tells the story of how, through journeys made in my own life, I gradually came to understand the three grand ideas of pilgrimage: pilgrimage to places, life itself as a journey, and the inner journey. My own story is woven together with various reflections on the history and theology of pilgrimage. It was fun to write, and I hope you will enjoy reading it.

Rachel Thorpe, writing for Evangelicals Now, says:
In The Writing on the Wall, Maggi Dawn sets about doing what John Stott called ‘double listening’ — ‘it means that we’re called to listen both to the Word of God, and to today’s world, in order to relate the one to the other’. In a deft move, she explains the Bible to the culturally literate, and culture to the biblically literate. This is no mean feat, requiring a collection of the most culturally iconic Bible stories and a whistle-stop tour of Western art right up to the 21st century…

Dawn follows the narrative of the Bible from creation to Revelation, stopping at stories like Noah’s Ark, Daniel in the lion’s den, the prodigal son and Jesus’s betrayal, to provide the full text of the story. She follows these with thoughts on the story’s significance and meaning in the form of paintings, music, poetry and sculptures, all from the canon of Western art. There is not space for her to fully critique every example, but the book is a treasure trove for anyone wanting interesting illustrations to use in sermons or with a youth group.

Dawn is insistent — and rightly so — that the Bible is central to an understanding of art in the West. Few would disagree: H.G. Wells called it ‘The Book that has held together the fabric of Western civilisation’ and Coleridge claimed that, ‘For more than a thousand years the Bible […] has gone hand in hand with civilisation’. Here, these claims are brought to bear on current cultural production as much as on classical works. From Handel to Belle and Sebastian, Van Gogh to Monty Python, this book chronicles the pervasive and powerful influence of the Bible, and draws our attention to the ways that it has been interpreted by artists throughout history.

Rebecca Paveley, Church Times

It is a consciously unpreachy book — an introduction to the Bible that does not demand a religious response. It is written in a lively and readable style by the multi-talented Dawn, and would make a good present for would-be English students who have skipped Sunday school — or even for those who haven’t. It contains much that is interesting and insightful for regular worshippers also, who are almost certainly not as biblically literate as Christians of 50 or 100 years ago.

Jonny Baker says:

…it’s delightfully written, easy to read and yet laden with nuggets. shakespeare, monty python, handel’s messiah, epstein’s jacob wrestling with an angel – these are the sorts of texts. they are mainly classic but plenty of pop culture thrown in the mix. i hope it makes it to high street book shops as it struck me that it’s written not just with a christian audience in mind.

as well as being a good read it’s a wonderful book to keep as a reference – i’ll pull it off the shelf next time i’m asked to preach on a story from the bible to see what art maggi connects with it.

books are changing – ipad, kindle and whatever comes next will change the way we think what a book is. i wish that new approach was here for this book. i wanted this to be a hyperlinked book so i that as i read i could click on a piece of music to hear it, or watch the scene from shawshank redemption, or see the art in question!

Kim Fabricius at Faith and Theology:

Biblical illiteracy in the UK is pandemic in popular and high culture alike. Enter Maggi Dawn, Cambridge college chaplain and star blog babe, to give us an education in this fabulous and fluent book, which takes what used to be well-known Bible stories, re-narrates them, and then shows what the arts have made of them down the ages… this is a book for the beginner. But the cognoscenti too will learn a lot from it, while preachers and Bible study leaders will find it a valuable resource for illustration and illumination…

Mark Meynell at Quaerentia:

I enjoyed and learned a great deal from The Writing on the Wall… for those who are familiar with the Bible, this will be a useful guide to extra-biblical paths not yet travelled. And for those familiar with western culture, vice versa!… As a readable introduction, this is a really helpful addition to any bookshelf (and even more so when it comes out in paperback!). It takes us on a thrilling cultural adventure.

Alan Wilson at Bishop Alan’s Blog:

…a trip through the Bible for the biblically ignorant but otherwise educated reader, giving some basic info and background on the stories that have shaped our literature and history. She doesn’t just tell the story, but gives enough background to it to help you understand its meaning, and why it may have been used as it has been. So she turns on a light bulb to illuminate a range of cultural basics — Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Milton, Spenser, Jacob Epstein, Wilfred Owen, William Blake, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, yea even Monty Python… and hundreds of others.

So, here is an ideal present for the sixth former in your life who seeks some background to our culture. Its clarity and sense of perspective may also help the busy preacher…

A review from Paul Fromont at Prodigal Kiwis

…Maggi’s book does its likely many readers a wonderful service, especially if those readers may have heard significant stories (.e.g. the Creation account, or the Fall etc) from the Bible, but never engaged or read them from within their own everyday contexts… Reading it will be a fruitful experience whether you read the Bible, think you know its stories, or have never read it before. It’s the kind of adventure we all need from time-to-time, and Maggi’s book is just the kind of accompanying friend we need.

The Goodbookstall says:

It is sometimes a surprise to recall that the teachings of Jesus, his vivid stories about idle servants, scary kings and landlords, seasons and festivals, even down to the very stuff of life – bread, wine, shelter, work – were not received as great theological truths by their first hearers… every generation has to ‘earth’ the teachings of Christ in the experiences of their own culture so that we, too, might have the same experience of recognition and understanding. Maggi Dawn’s book contributes greatly to this perennial need.

Chasing Francis is Ian Morgan Cron’s first book. Its theme is the way that Church and its ministers can break down when institutional structure squeezes the life out of them.  But it’s an unusual book in that it tries to fuse several forms together – it’s a mix of novel, historical biography and theology. In many ways it works very well indeed – the main character, Chase Falson, is the Pastor a “the largest Evangelical church in New England” who has a breakdown under the pressure of a ministry that’s coming adrift from his personal convictions. His Church’s way of dealing with the problem is to give him enforced leave of absence, after which he must either come back with his faith restored, or move over and let someone else take over. Falson goes to Italy and stays with some Franciscan monks, one of whom is his Uncle Kenny. He finds his faith is restored – but in a story that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the fortunes of conversations such as “Emerging”,  Postevangelical, and the like, Falson finds this happens only when he allows his faith to be entirely reshaped, not merely with a new vision of Church, but with a rediscovery that the true riches of faith are threaded all through the church’s history. What happens when he comes back to his Church, fired with vision for the gospel but speaking a different language, is the end of the tale.

Ian Cron is a good writer – this is his first book, and the characters are believeable, the storyline moves along, and there are plenty of wonderfully humorous and touchingly poignant moments. The only places it creaks a little – in the same way that Gaarder’s Sophie’s World did – are where, under the strain of trying to be a story that makes a point, the story goes a bit muddy: there are pages where the story has to stand still while a sermon is preached or a lesson delivered. I wonder if there isn’t something inherent in the form of fiction that demands that you can’t absolutely make a point and still have fiction that lives and breathes. But that’s a literary discussion for another day, and despite these fault lines, like Gaarder’s book, Cron’s book is well worth reading. If you like McLaren’s fiction, are interested in the idea of Emerging church or New Monasticism, or are weary of church as you know it, I warmly recommend this one to you. You might just find something of yourself in its pages.

Keeping a blog has done several things for me. The first is that it’s one of the few modes of writing that you publish instantly, and get an instant response. Not everyone wants that, but I like the sense of keeping in touch with what interests readers, and what they think. The second is that long ago someone said to me, “If you want to be a writer, write every day. Doesn’t matter much what you write, but you have to do it all the time.” The blog gave me a way of writing one short piece every day about what was going on around me. Readers bugged me if I didn’t write. And after a few months I had a message from TallSkinnyKiwi, one of the granddaddies of blogging, that said “I like your blog better now. You seem to have found your voice.”

The voice matters. When I started the blog eight years ago I was writing academic papers, lectures, supervision reports and committee reports. I knew more about theology than was strictly necessary, and I could write things down that made sense, words in the right order, delivering the information. That’s what I had been trained to do. But in the process I had lost my voice; in fact, one adviser in particular had criticised me for writing “too much like a book” and insisted I rewrite some materials in a strictly technical style. The blog helped me to recover and develop a voice again.

But you know what? Before the blog I had been published – a chapter or two in a book here and there. But the blog itself actually won me two publishing contracts. I didn’t have an agent; I didn’t send a manuscript to anyone. The publisher came to me and said “We want somebody who writes like you.”

So there you go. Now I write weekly instead of daily on the blog because I spend a lot of time writing books in the voice I developed here. Right now I’m finishing a manuscript for the book of 2011. When it’s done I have to decide what to write for the one after that. Any thoughts?

One of the things I always recommend to people when they are reading a new thinker is to take careful note of the context into which that person wrote. Context isn’t everything. But it can illumine why someone wrote in a particular way. For instance, the neo-orthodoxy of the 20th century was not only a reaction against the anthropologically centred liberalism of the 19th century, it was also a response to a world at war. Theology, like everything else in Europe, was never the same again after 1918.

What qualifies something as theology, then? Is it the method, or the style, or the terminiology? Julian of Norwich was the first woman (in fact the first person) to write a surviving work of theology in English. Why write in English? Was it a cultural statement, an issue of accessibility? No, it was an accident of history; as a woman she was not schooled in scholastic Latin or in the Medieval Disuptation. SO she wrote in the language she knew, and in a form that, at the time, would not have been recognised as “proper” theology. What qualifies her book as theology is that it looks in depth at the character and being of God, and the consequent understanding of who human beings are in relationship to that God.

Context is important, then. But context isn’t everything. Sometimes the value of reading an old book is not so much to see its context, but to see what things rise above context; what is enduring from one age to the next. C S Lewis was a champion of reading the classics (unsurprisingly, given that he was a Medievalist at Oxford where they strongly resisted the study of literaturea as a “proper” subject until surprisngly late). Never read two “new” books in a row, Lewis advised – always read an old one in between, or read at least one old for every two new. Why? because

“…Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

This morning I woke from a strange Alice In Wonderland kind of dream, in which I was lost in a world of books. I smiled as I drank my morning tea from a mug that is inscribed with words from Little Women – “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain”. Every girl should have a mug like this.

When I started blogging seven years ago I wasn’t writing books. Since then I’ve written a lot of articles and three books. A couple of days ago I mentioned the conception of another book. This writing of books is becoming a new habit. And there isn’t time to blog in the same way I used to. No more the daily blogger. It’s become too many plates to spin. Time for a new plan.

Here’s my new blog strategy. I’ll post one  decent length, thoughtful post about something that matters, something seasonal. One a week, on a Tuesday morning.In between I’ll put up little top-ups as they appear. But once a week there will be something here worth reading. Stop by once a week and here it will be. I’m not giving up blogging. just concentrating my energies.

Thank you for reading. See you on Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that.

My Lent book for 2010 is called Giving it Up. It’s a book of 47 short chapters, so you can read one every day through Lent. This is the theme: most people associate Lent with giving something up – like beer or coffee or chocolate. But if you really want to understand and know what the whole “God” thing is about, there is something much more important that you have to give up – it’s your existing concept of God, all the ideas about God that you’ve accumulated, often unconsciously, from all over the place.

People in the Bible had to do it (like Moses, for instance). All kinds of early Christians had to do it (like Gregory of Nyssa, St Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, for instance). Various characters in the history of the Church have recorded how they had to give up the idea of the God they didn’t believe in in order to become a believer. These and others feature in the book, along with some other Lent challenges, Bible stories and contemporary reflections.

It’s available in various bookshops and direct from the publisher. If you click here to order it via the Amazon UK or USA links below, you will also be supporting this blog. Thanks for reading!