One of the pleasures of reading resides in the flourishing condition of biography. According to publishing statistics, biographies sell better than any other genre of serious literature. Some, such as Leon Edel’s five-volume life of Henry James or Michael Holroyd’s three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw, not to mention Martin Gilbert’s monumental series on Winston Churchill, may seem so overwhelming as to tax even the most devoted student of other people’s stories. Really great biographies, however, such as these all plainly are, only hold their readers in thrall to the next instalment. It was a long wait from Edel’s first volume (1953), which got James to the age of twenty seven, to the final instalment (1972), but no reader once under Edel’s spell would easily have lost patience. Even then, Edel’s one-volume abridgment (1985), no doubt all that any reader but a fanatical Jamesian would now tackle, is arguably better still than the original work. But one could easily list a dozen other superb modem biographies H Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, by Robert Bernard Martin (1980), for example, to mention only the one that has most recently come my way.

Peter Hebblethwaite records that, when he submitted one chapter of his new book, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (Harper Collins, London, 1993, £35), to Archbishop Luigi Barbarito, Pro-Nuncio to Great Britain, for comment, he was told that it would not be possible to write a ‘true and objective life of a Pontiff’

Acts is a good story. But what kind of a good story it is has exercised scholars. For a long time Luke was regarded as an historian, but he was an historian who reported unhistorical speeches and constructed unlikely journeys. Theologians have tended-to sum up Acts as (I quote from the New Oxford Annotated RSV) ‘the triumphant narrative of the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome’. More recently, scholars with literary interests have begun to argue that Acts is not meant to be historiography. Richard Pervo argues in Profit with Delight, that Acts is like ancient novels in its conventions and structures; therefore its fictionality is legitimate, and not a little bit of its agenda is to entertain.

Brian Reardon points out many elements of ancient romance in Acts: its setting in a near-contemporary familiar world, travel with the aspect of purposeful journey (quest) which generates plot, adventure with trials and successes, rescue or salvation. Richard Pervo finds in the ancient world a sizeable body of prose fictions which he calls ‘novels’ and which display numerous conventions easily discoverable in Acts: adventures (including arrests, persecutions, plots, trials, shipwreck and snakes), miracles, riots and rowdy scenes, exotic and utopian elements, an active providence, a robust hero, an episodic plot. We may assume, then, that ‘Luke’ was a fiction-addict, also steeped in Biblical narrative and prophetic literature, who employed received conventions of historiography and fiction-writing to make Acts a readable story with recognizable features. He structures his story through a progress which gets Christianity—largely in the briefcase of the apostle Paul—from Jerusalem to Rome.

In his important study of The New Era in Religious Communication, Pierre Babin offers a startling juxtaposition of two very different thought- world. First, he introduces us to the practice, among some Indian tribes living in the Canadian wilderness, of plugging children’s nostrils and covering their eyes soon after birth, the better to attune them to the noises of the forest in which they will have to survive. Then, in stark contrast to these “hyperauditory” individuals, made alert to the subtlest natural sounds: the whisper of snow falling on the leafless branches of aspen and birch, the footfalls of deer in soft summer mud, the long indrawn breath of a hibernating bear and so on, Babin invites readers to consider a modem American adolescent reared in front of the brash sights and sounds of the TV screen. Such an individual will have logged some 20,000 hours of viewing by the age of sixteen. How, Babin asks, can these two individuals be supposed to have the same reference range or to have a similar idea of God and the transcendent? Is it possible that their sense of the holy could follow even remotely similar contours or be effectively explored or addressed by a single method of approach?

To some extent, the hyperauditory Indian and the media-saturated American can be taken as representing two forms of consciousness and communication which Babin spends much of his book outlining. On the one hand there is the linear, analytic, and alphabetical mode.

The potential for theology to act as a partner in dialogue with the natural sciences is itself a subject for dispute. Those who argue that dialogue is not possible propose that theology is concerned with questions which are outside the realm of science. Such questions are answered through a mystical approach to God that defies the very presuppositions that are the basis of scientific research. The recent tendency amongst theologians to portray early scientists as the archvillains, rather than the priests of creation is noteworthy in this regard. At the opposite end of the spectrum there is the attitude which treats theology as another science. This is not so much a rehabilitation of the idea of theology as ‘queen of the sciences’, but a redefinition of theology taking into account scientific methods of research. The latter form the basis of an hermeneutical approach to scripture which takes account of recent research in historical criticism. A third and perhaps mediating approach, looks at the history of the philosophy of science and insists that these early scientists considered that their belief in nature as having a supernatural element did not hinder the advancement of science. The call now is for a reenchantment of science so that it recovers a more holistic approach characteristic of these early researchers. The clash between the first and third alternatives is that in the first case the scientists are blamed for the current ecological crisis, while in the latter they are heralded as angels of light from the past.