Spiritually competent practice in health care

Percy speaks with a prophetic voice to all modern people, and not necessarily only to those who would describe themselves as ‘Christians’ or ‘Anglicans’. Better than any other contemporary I can think of, Percy’s great achievement, in my view, is to engage theologically with the social sciences thereby deepening and enriching a modern approach to spirituality, and doing this while staying faithful to Christian orthodoxy. He lays the foundations for a generous, inclusive spirituality that seeks to integrate and make sense of human experience and learning. His other great achievement is to help his readers to see how, in his view, God is at work in contemporary culture and secular learning, and that to ignore God in those contexts is to impoverish faith, worship, and understanding. Despite the pleasure of reading the critical appraisals of Percy’s work in the earlier parts of the book, what I enjoyed more were the extracts of Percy’s own writings in the second half. Percy comes across as pastorally wise, insightful, thoughtful, irenic but not flaccid – with all these virtues set in a winsome prose style. To my mind, he is one of the great, pastor-theologians of the Christian Church today, who has integrated faith with wide-ranging learning in disciplines sometimes regarded as implicitly hostile to faith and spirituality. As a result, his work makes spirituality, churches, and theology attractive, and sometimes exciting! Martyn Percy has not said the last word on much of what he writes about, and I suspect he would be the first to say that; rather, he has helped us to think critically, to welcome secular learning, and to re-consider carefully how we might understand faith and spirituality for and in the twenty-first century. He balances learning from the social sciences with tradition and orthodoxy, and therebyprovides a reasoned, reasonable, and radical challenge to theway inwhichwe construe ourselves, Christian spirituality, and the Church. This is no mean achievement. And if you read nothing else of this book, read Percy’s Afterword, subtitled, ‘ASelf-Critical Retrospect’: it is visionary, prophetic, and almost poetic. It summarizes the heart of Percy’s spirituality and theology.