The Bible forms a key part in the development of critical theological thinking and reflection on experience. Equally, to understand how we as individuals read the bible, we need to be critically aware of our own stories and context. Text and life, tradition and experience, are inextricably intertwined. 
 "In a Glass Darkly" offers for the first time a critical dialogue between practical theology and biblical hermeneutics. It considers the role of emotional engagement and critical understanding in biblical interpretation from here and presents being critical as an act which is just as much appreciative as it is suspicious.

'God’s word… examines critically the reflections and thoughts of a heart’. It is this function of Scripture that Bennett and Rowland explore in this highly creative book – the role the Bible plays in our learning to be critically reflective. Through an imaginative engagement with apocalyptic and its unmaskings, insights from John Ruskin and William Blake, and moving autobiographical reflections, In a Glass Darkly provokes the reader to examine their assumptions as to how the text of the Bible and life interact. It will certainly ‘rouse the faculties’ of the reader as the authors intend.' -- Andrew Rogers, University of Roehampton, UK
This book commends itself not only as the fruits of a particular collaboration between two leading figures in their respective fields, but as testimony to us all of the unique possibilities of friendship within intellectual life. -- Elaine Graham

Zoë Bennett is Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Studies in Pastoral Theology at Anglia Ruskin University and the Cambridge Theological Federation. She is the author of Your MA in Theology (SCM Press 2014). Christopher Rowland was formerly Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture and Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford from 1991 until 2014 and is a co-author of Theological Reflection for Human Flourishing (SCM Press 2012).