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Book Review: Towards Tragedy/Reclaiming Hope: Literature, Theology and Sociology in Conversation

identification and sharing in discovery’. Nevertheless faith asserts that some values, most crucially those of the self-sacrificial love of the Sermon on the Mount, are non-negotiable. This is not a theology without absolutes. In the final part, Newlands embarks on a dialogue with other disciplines, again ranging widely over some difficult territory, which includes Auden, Eliot and Wittgenstein as well as the natural sciences. What emerges is a series of overlapping cultures, each with its own distinctive subject matter and methods, but always open to dialogue with theology. Newlands compares his own method with that of Keith Ward and others who have conversed with other traditions without losing sight of the distinctiveness and uniqueness of Christianity. Theology provides the indispensable partner in any project as the ‘key contributor to the search for human understanding’. This means it will often appear as fragments, but always committed to hypothesis and revision, trial and error. The final chapter presents a programme for future engagement which brings the concept of transcendence to bear on culture while at the same time engaging in constructive dialogue. Theology is a discipline in its infancy based on the tradition of the love of God in Jesus Christ and focused on the realization of this vision in peace and justice. As such it remains vital in the provisionalities and ambiguities of the present. While this book is hardly likely to win plaudits from those with little sense of the frailty of their own systems, it offers a deeply attractive method to those concerned with the salvation of the world. Indeed ‘engaged fallibilistic pluralism’ may be the only hope not just for theology, but for the future of the world created and redeemed by God.