It is a privilege to be invited, either by a publisher or an author, to pen a wee endorsement for a book that’s worth endorsing. (In those cases where one is invited to endorse a lemon, the feeling is very much a vexed otherwise, and one feels compelled to either decline the invitation or to employ one’s skills to write in code.) Recently, a number of such invitations have come my way, two titles regarding which I am pleased to see are now available, and which I was pleased to endorse without recourse to the game of codes. They are:

Karl Barth in Conversation. Edited by W. Travis McMaken & David W. Congdon (Pickwick Publications, 2014)

‘In this welcome collection of colorful and stimulating input from young scholars, we get to eavesdrop on some new “conversations” surveying a diverse range of themes, and in the wake of the fresh questions raised, we are invited to hear again what Barth and others have heard and misheard’.

Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross. By Andrew Root (Fortress Press, 2014)

‘This stimulating and challenging volume advances the claims that theology is grounded in the cruciform ministry of the Triune God and fashioned in the intersections of concrete human affairs, and that ministry is revelatory of God’s being-in-movement. Root’s dogmatic and pastoral instincts inform a renewed and much-welcomed intent to stay on a course recognizably determined by the life of God present and experienced in the world’.