Some books by St Philip's people

Maurice Nevile

Translating Loss: A Haiku Collection, by Maurice Nevile. 2022. With artwork by the late Susan Joy Nevile.

Maurice began writing haiku about two and half years after his wife died in August 2018. The poems explore loss and grief, love and longing, and finding new ways to experience, understand, and move forward in a changed life. Here are over eighty haiku, and one longer poem ‘Only lived’. They can be read in any order, but if read cover to cover will give a sense of a journey from loss to new life, from endings to beginnings. The book features watercolour paintings by the author's wife, completed in her final months when she was no longer able to quilt, her usual artistic practice. (Down as free pdf from https://www.academia.edu/101477140/Translating_Loss_A_haiku_collection_2022_

Scott Cowdell

Professor Scott Cowdell was an Honorary Associate Priest at St Philip's from February 2018 until March 2024. He was subsequently received into the Roman Catholic Church in Canberra and began a period of discernment with a view to ordination as a Roman Catholic priest.

Rejoice & Be Glad: Gospel Preaching for Christian Festivals. (Melbourne: Coventry Press, 2024)

Jesus’ command to preach the Gospel was well realised in the church from earliest times. It is a ministry of service to the community, a constant and sustained commitment to taking seriously the gospel message, relating it to the needs and challenges of faithful disciples in every generation.

Scott Cowdell’s series of sermons belongs within that tradition. Scott brings his insight, sensitivity and informed comment to the task of inviting listeners and readers to reflect on texts set for the church’s high and holy days. The liberating joy of the gospel is proclaimed a voice at both traditional contemporary. Unfailingly centred on Jesus Christ, Rejoice and be Glad is for all who seek to deepen their understanding of the biblical texts and the particular challenges of faithful discipleship in our own times. (The book includes sermons preached at St Philips!)
(Available from Coventry Press in Melbourne at https://coventrypress.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=201.)

Why Church? Christianity as It Was Meant to Be. (New York: Church Publishing 2024)

Scott argues for the centrality of the Eucharistic church in an increasingly individualistic and fragmented world. As Western culture has secularized, the church has been seen as providing support and optional resources, rather than being essential to Christian life. In Why Church?> Cowdell considers how we have arrived at such a place, and how perceptions of the church have changed in response to increasing individualism and institutional failings. Suggesting that the Eucharistic Church embodies Christ’s desire to draw humankind to himself, Scott shows how the Christian life depends on the Christian community, which is the church. He helps us to see the Church afresh, as if for the first time.
(Buy from Amazon Australia at https://www.amazon.com.au/Why-Church-Christianity-Was-Meant/dp/1640657363..)

Church Matters: Essays and Addresses on Ecclesial Belonging. (Coventry Press, 2024)

This selection of essays and addresses, most of them previously published either in books, journals or online between 1996 and 2021, reflects the theological journey of a distinguished Anglican priest and theologian. Written primarily within the Anglican tradition where Scott Cowdell worked as pastor and teacher, the reflections raise significant issues of concern for churches everywhere.

Informed by sources as varied as Banjo Paterson and Ignatius of Loyola, the essays throughout raise primary questions of how the church matters in contemporary Australian society, where Christianity and church are increasingly at the margins of people’s concerns and where various ways of being church compete for the attention of congregations and their leaders. This ‘gift of secularisation’, Scott suggests, is an opportunity for the church to reconsider what is important in its traditions and structures; and asks what may be needed to bring the churches to a fresh understanding of the reasons for their very existence.
(Available from Coventry Press at https://coventrypress.com.au/chuch-matters.)