Serving the Cross: the striking ambiguity of the phrase says a great deal about the Darlinghurst parish. An earlier rector, ‘Anniversary Archie’ Morton, first used it in 1962 in newspaper articles on the changing history of St John’s. Paul Egan has revived it, with telling effect, in his far from short historical account.

I wish I had read this book at the start of my ministry and not twenty years down the track. Not because it is all new to me - though I have learnt a lot reading it - but because it says things so sharply, urgently and well.

This is a ‘secular’ book from a secular publisher, but it is written by an ordained minister from Texas. As such, it intends not to replace or make fun of the parables, but to satirise political correctness and any attempts to domesticate Jesus’ parables and rule them out as irrelevant for today.

What do you call a book that brings together a recipe for Coca Cola Roast, the elegant observations of ancient Japanese writer Shonagon, the scripts for numerous documentaries and a very convincing argument for vegetarianism? Oh, and a love story. And an anti-love story. I think that's about it.

Jostein Gaarder hit bestseller lists from Berlin to Brisbane in the early 1990s with Sophie’s World (1991) – essentially a primer on philosophy wrapped in a novel. Gaarder, a former philosophy lecturer in Bergen, Norway, wrote Sophie’s World as a way to introduce philosophy to Norwegian teenagers. He says he was taken aback by the novel’s worldwide success. But this has only served to spur him to write more focused works addressing the ‘big questions’: where do we come from? Why are we here?

One might have thought that Paul Barnett had sorted out New Testament history aleady. But the Preface to the new book reveals a ‘regret’: ...after a lifetime of attempting to do so by other means, I am now at last beginning to grasp the message and meaning of the New Testament (p11). Clearly we are invited to look for something fresh and profound that has emerged in this comprehensive study, something not fully grasped in its predecessors.

Diana Williams, a former US corporate high flyer, seems an unlikely partner for an Australian ‘Bush Aboriginal’. Yet in 1984 Diana and (Uncle) Ron Williams married, living in and out of tents, in the desert, creek beds and anywhere they could help meet the needs of Indigenous people.

John Spong’s autobiography has been published to coincide with his retirement as Bishop of Newark. It is hardly surprising then that this book should read like a defence of his ecclesiastical career. It is dominated by Spong’s conviction that his leadership has provided the direction which will allow the Christian church to survive into the next millennium.