Seven Last Words: an invitation to a deeper friendship with Jesus
JAMES MARTIN, SJ

James martin’s book reads more like a long homily than a volume on spirituality. That’s because it is a homily: a set of reflections delivered at St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, on Good Friday last year. James Martin is a Jesuit and, in keeping with Ignatian trad­ition, these short pieces on Jesus’ last words from the Cross invite the reader to inhabit the gospels; to live out the Passion in the privacy of the mind.

That sounds gruelling, and at times it is. Martin is an excellent communicator, one of the anglophone world’s foremost media clerics. He knows how to render the familiar-yet-strange events of Good Friday in such a way that the reader does not so much relate to Jesus’ experience as taste it.