Tuesday 28 April 2020

Book Review: Healthy Faith and the Coronavirus Crisis, edited by Luke Cawley and Kristi Mair

Healthy Faith and the Coronavirus Crisis: Thriving in the COVID-19 Pandemic, edited by Luke Cawley and Kristi Mair (London: IVP, 2020)

I am grateful to IVP for sending me a pre-publication version of this book for review.

In times of crisis, Christians are still challenged to follow Jesus and to keep whatever degree of love they have for him fresh and supple. But the present COVID-19 pandemic is raising all sorts of issues and queries about the form Christian discipleship takes in an age of physical distancing, online church services, and the like. There are already a number of responses to these from various Christian perspectives: John Piper, for example, has released Coronavirus and Christ, which I suspect could prove divisive; Roger Carswell has produced an evangelistic tract, Hope Beyond Coronavirus; and Walter Brueggemann, whose work on the Psalms is insightful, is bringing out Virus as a Summons to Faith in the next week. If you are inclined to process life and discipleship through reading and reflecting, there is a wealth of new material forthcoming or already available.

Of course, only time will tell how far any written response to COVID-19 has strengthened our resolve to follow Christ during such testing times, but there is one new book that I believe should prove especially helpful and inspiring: Healthy Faith and the Coronavirus Crisis, edited by Luke Cawley and Kristi Mair, due for publication as an e-book on 5 May 2020. The aim of Healthy Faith is to motivate its readers to stand firm in the current situation by providing guidance and advice on how to practise Christian discipleship in such unusual conditions. While I am certain the book will achieve this goal, many if not all of the chapters contain wisdom that can be carried over into post-lockdown life, too. Healthy Faith is specifically designed for life in 2020, but it may also be regarded as a sort of handbook for Christian life more generally.

Healthy Faith is divided into four main sections. The opening section, ‘(re)orientation’, contains the editors’ contributions: an introduction to the project as a whole plus a meditation on what ‘home’ means for us as humans made in the triune God’s image. Section two, ‘fragile life’, addresses issues such as dying, uncertainty, grief, loneliness, and fear, as well as the purpose of viruses in God’s world. This section should prove especially accommodating for those who need to process their thoughts and feelings about COVID-19’s immediate impact on our more existential questions. ‘Connected life’, the third section, focuses on the social aspects of lockdown and offers empathetic reflections on unemployment and work, singleness, marriage, and parenting. And in section four, ‘growing life’, the contributors suggest ways in which we can utilise our imaginations and creativity so that our faith and discipleship remain open to God and to each other. Outside the four main sections, Healthy Faith closes with an afterword from Tom Wright and is supplemented by nine appendices, including tips for working from home, prayers, advice on safeguarding matters, and an outline of legal issues relating to end-of-life decisions.

One significant advantage of Healthy Faith is that, as a multi-author book, it is not written merely from one person’s perspective. The contributors (see the full table of contents here) all demonstrate expertise and offer sound commentary, guidance, and advice where appropriate. Inevitably, depending on your life circumstances, some chapters will be more relevant than others: a married couple will not find the chapter on singleness strictly applicable, for example, and an aged widower is unlikely to digest the chapter on parenting. But I would encourage everyone to read through the whole book, as even the chapters that are at first glance irrelevant yield intuitions and perceptions that should kindle empathy for those with circumstances differing in the details from our own. And there are some chapters that will be immediately and obviously relevant, and hopefully helpful, for everyone.

No book is perfect, of course. Many of the chapters understandably open with some kind of description of how COVID-19 has changed our world; but reading so many accounts, however brief, of the same phenomenon soon became tiresome. And I dare say anyone who completes Healthy Faith will still be wanting more, despite its already varied content; for example, I would like to have seen a chapter on how introverts and extroverts can cope with the lockdown, a chapter briefly exploring the political and/or cultural aspects of COVID-19 (e.g. why different countries adopt different lockdown policies), and even some speculation on what Christian discipleship in a post-COVID-19 world could look like. But such criticisms are minor and Healthy Faith is essential reading for any Christian.

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