Modernised transport and increased access to Jerusalem in the mid-19 th century gave rise to what this excellent history (‘Under Jerusalem : the Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City’ by Andrew Lawler. Doubleday, 2023) depicts as an imperial ‘race’ for the secrets in stone and artifacts either submerged or in plain sight of the Holy City. France, then Britain, Germany and Russia are amongst the nations that expend money, material, and personnel in their different bids to lay claim to the truth about the religious past. The truth itself proves elusive over many decades, as excavators offer up contradictory theories about the exact site of the Prophet’s Dream, the Passion narratives, Solomon’s and then Herod’s Temple, and other major facts of shared interest. Results are mixed. General Gordon, for example, he of Khartoum fame, engages in his own military-style survey, with definitively expressed ideas that a French scholar of the time described as “wonderfully weird.” The ca
An anthology of 100 poems written in the past 100 years, with readerly responses on each from Rowan Williams, is a kind of autobiography of the archbishop’s roving mind. Titled ‘A Century of Poetry’, the book’s subtitle gets to the point with the claim that we are “searching the heart.” This is not a best-of or my-favourites collection, but one where poems “open the door to some fresh, searching, and challenging insights about the life of faith.” The English poet Michael Symmons Roberts opens ‘A New Song’: Sing a new song to the Lord, sing through the skin of your teeth, sing in the code of your blood, sing with a throat full of earth To which Rowan asks, why do we praise? Then answers, “praise is as inescapable as lament in the human world. The singing evoked here is not a full-throated self-indulgent performance; it is what manages to escape from choked and knotted insides because it can’t be contained; and it names or at least points towards what can’t be named.” H