This festschrift for Stephen Pattison is contextually set against the decline of mainstream churches in the United Kingdom and the political downgrading and institutional demise of theology and religious studies in the academy. Sixteen essayists engage with Pattison’s oeuvre, reviewing themes of contextual reflection, social analysis, theological critique, pastoral and practical applications, developing Pattison’s considerations for a ‘future faith’ not encumbered by adherence to a past from which the tide is receding. This is an important book because through his compellingly engaging and extensive writing as well as his genial personality, Stephen Pattison remains one of the most significant pastoral and practical theologians of the last forty to fifty years despite significantly debilitated by a cruel haemorrhagic stroke. The working model referenced by each essayist is Pattison’s motif of ‘conversation’. Following an ‘Introduction’, the book has three sections, in turn: Practical and Public Theology, Chaplaincy and Pastoral Care, Professional and Public Values.

Elaine Graham sets the tone of the festschrift in the first chapter by outlining Pattison’s ‘model of theological understanding [as] inherently dialogical or “conversational”’. Deploying this model Pattison has, and following him, the essayists have, engaged with a wide range of social, behavioural and human sciences deriving ‘from a conviction that human experience and reason are as capable of mediating divine truth as the formal doctrines of the Church, but that the symbols and doctrines of the Christian faith need to be reinterpreted anew by each generation in order to disclose its truths’. (13) Engagement with other disciplines, rather than individual scholarly theological reflection, is the modus operandi. The editors had set this orientation in their ‘Introduction’, ‘we suggest that theologians step back from the focus on biblical studies and doctrinal topics, as these are of limited interest to the declining numbers of people belonging to the churches, [and entering academic theology] in favour of thinking creatively about new areas’ (2) But, we must ask, what will happen if depth consideration of complex doctrinal material be sidelined, or indeed, scholarly analysis of taxing manuscripts minimized, or such skill-sets disappear? Might the baby be lost with the bathwater? Moving on, Heather Walton’s essay ‘Rethinking Relations between Art and Theology in Troubled Times’ is an important contribution on, inter alia, performance art and curation. From a teenage reading of Paul Tillich and Martin Luther King she recounts leading a post-graduate seminar with Pattison which, she tantalizingly phrases, ‘stands as the provocation to the chain of reflections I offer below’. (67) For her, the question arises, where do the theologian and the artist stand in relation to one another and to the world they mutually inhabit? Those unfamiliar with art critique will find themselves in new and challenging territory when they read this essay!

Practitioners will readily engage with the book’s second, shortest section, ‘Chaplaincy and Pastoral Care’. ‘Liminality’ as experienced by chaplains in both academy and health-care settings is a repeating theme across several authors. Chaplains do indeed work in ‘liminal spaces’. However, a synonym for ‘liminality’ is ‘peripheral’. Therein lies the rub. If chaplaincy, as favourably understood and recognized by several of the essayists, is peripheral, how can it authoritatively speak to the ‘centre’? Equally, and from the perspective of the ‘centre’, why should it bother with something that does not concern it, much though those on the periphery, in the liminal space, feel it should? ‘Clever’ organizations can deliberately keep chaplains ‘peripheral and liminal’; namely, out of the way, largely out of sight and thus from the organization’s preferred perspective, ineffectual. Mansur Ali’s essay on chaplaincy is a moving and tender reflection. In a mostly Christian-based book, the importance of having a Muslim voice in conversation cannot be understated. His debt to Pattison and to another essayist, Sophie Gilliat-Ray, is profound and personal.

Future Faith’s third and final section, ‘Professional and Public Values’, is perhaps the most varied. Huw Thomas has a fascinating chapter on ‘Values talk in British Universities’ as seen through the lens of novels written about university life over the last fifty years. This easy-to-read chapter is subtle in approach and thoughtfully critical of much in the modern academy. One of Pattison’s major contributions to scholarship remains his analysis of ‘shame’. It is fitting that the festschrift’s final chapter considers ‘shame’ seriously. Its author, Sally Nash, weaves narrative and poetry through thoughtful theological expression, ‘For all of us to feel that our faces are acceptable … each person contributing to and reflecting something of the Imago Dei … worthy of the respect and dignity that they would give Jesus, the image of God in human form’. (247)

Future Faith is wide-ranging; sign-posting convivial places of entangled action-based encounter. Far from defining what should be, it sets trajectories of varied responsive possibility from which no question is excluded.