Still Crazy - Love, laughter and tears from the world of the Sacred Diarist,
by Adrian Plass 

Focuses on two new themes: growing older and the Covid pandemic, which may help readers to work through their traumas and questions

Still Crazy - Love, laughter and tears from the world of the Sacred Diarist
By Adrian Plass
Hodder and Stoughton
ISBN 978-1-473-67956-6
Reviewed by Pieter J. Lalleman

Ever since he burst onto the Christian stage with The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37+3⁄4 in 1987, Adrian Plass (born 1948) has been publishing books for Christians, which can also be given to interested non-believers. In addition to the Diaries, there are light-hearted novels, poems, a book on Blind Spots in the Bible and miscellanies.  

The present book is another such pastiche which – among many other things – focuses on two new themes: growing older and the Covid pandemic. Plass does use the opportunity to refer to his earlier work but also tells us about a recent major illness. The publisher shows great confidence in the product by issuing it as a hardback.

The book’s nine chapters have the following titles: ‘Still got something to say’, ‘Marching on’, ‘Adrian Plass and the summer festival’, ‘All people great and small’, ‘Blessed be Scargill [i.e., Scargill House in Yorkshire]’, ‘Matters of life and death in pandemic times’, ‘Still silly’, ‘Shadows of shadows’ and ‘Love is the reason for living’. Within most of these chapters, various subjects are tackled and poems included. Various Bible passages are discussed in some detail.

I suppose that Plass provided for a need when he first started writing, because in those days much of evangelical Christianity was characterised by robust, modernist certainties and practices which could do with some questioning and a shower of mild irony. Now that most of us have become postmodern, Plass’ warm-hearted annotations seem somehow less relevant. His reflections on the recent pandemic, on the other hand, may help readers to work through their traumas and questions.  

 

The Revd Dr Pieter J. Lalleman is the minister of Knaphill Baptist Church