Why God? Stories to Inspire Faith

Richard Leonard SJ, PAULIST PRESS, ISBN 9780809156610

Richard Leonard will be well known to most of our readers. He has given many retreats, reflection days, and online lectures. He has also written many books, each displaying his gift for finding light words for often heavy topics and for telling stories based on his extensive experience as parish priest and communicator. He has a good-humoured and sometimes mischievous style.

Why God? gathers together a number of short contributions to the English Catholic magazine, The Tablet. They range over topics of interest to Catholics, many of them controversial or uncomfortable. They include celibacy, religious liberty, rigidity, sexual abuse and gender change. Much of his writing is designed to offer an alternative to a rigid form of Catholic faith which seems to commend fear, anxiety, rigour and control. In all his writing he explores a question and illustrates it with compassionate stories of people and reference to popular TV series and movies. Eternal truths are embodied in flaky human beings. The Church that he commends is a human affair in which faith and love are found in quirky people who channel Christ. For most readers that will be encouraging.

His writing is pious, not in the negative sense of being prune-faced, but in its ancient sense of respecting elders and the Catholic tradition.