New Jacques Ellul books - only in French!

I did my research on Jacques Ellul and although I’ve not kept up to speed with the literature on him as much as I would like since I finished I’m quite excited to discover that there is what looks like a major (392pp) new study in French which has just come out.

It’s called Jacques Ellul: Une pensée en dialogue and is written by Frédéric Rognon who is Professor in Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Protestant Theology in Strasbourg.

He has said a little about Ellul at the publisher’s website and the introduction of the book is online.

It may be that there will be a revival of interest in him in France as there was recently a single volume (of 1040 pages !!) published containing eight of his theological works.

Again I can only find all the stuff in French but there is information and an interview with a former pupil of Ellul online and the book is described. In addition to a preface by Antoine Nouis and biblical index it includes the following books - links are to online PDFs of the English translations others of which are also available online:

• Présence au monde moderne (1948) [Presence of the Kingdom]
• Le livre de Jonas (1952) [The Judgment of Jonah]
• l’Homme et l’argent (1953) [Money and Power]
• Politique de Dieu, politiques de l’homme (1966) [The Politics of God and the Politics Of Man]
• Contre les violents (1972) [Violence]
• L’impossible prière (1972) [Prayer and Modern Man]
• Un chrétien pour Israël (1986) [A Christian For Israel - untranslated]
• Si tu es le fils de Dieu (1991) [If You Are the Son of God - currently being translated]

A volume singing his praises and demonstrating his foresight about our contemporary world was published back in 2004.

I suspect I may come back and say more about him on this blog though of course what he would make of this form of communication is quite another matter....

Prison Reform & Jonathan Aitken

It is reported today that Jonathan Aitken is to head a taskforce study into prison reform. It has been set up by the Centre for Social Justice that was established by former Conservative party leader, Iain Duncan Smith. This is, sadly, a much neglected issue and it is exciting to know Jonathan will be leading a serious study into this problem. He does so, of course, with experience from the inside after his conviction for perjury which he vividly recounted in his book Pride and Perjury (though sadly Peter Preston, the editor of the Guardian at the time, remains sceptical about Jonathan’s suitability for this task) .

He also does so as a committed Christian and the biographer of the leading US Christian prison reformer (and also former leading politician and ex-prisoner), Charles Colson.

It will be most interesting to see the fruit of this work which will come out of personal passion about this subject and careful Christian thinking.

This is undoubtedly an area where Christian theologians and churches need to be doing more thinking and be more active.

The Roman Catholic Church recently produced (in 2004) an important study of the topic - A Place of Redemption: A Christian Approach to Punishment and Prison.

I had some problem getting the PDF to download at first but it eventually worked. There is a cached HTML of it easily available and also a PDF study guide on it for sixth-formers from the Catholic Education Service. A guide to the CofE’s various statements on these issues - including the important subject of restorative justice - and other links is available on their website.