A book examining the highs and lows of the history of Christianity and weighing up the question of whether the world is better as a result, has won SparkLit’s Australian Christian Book of the Year award.
Natasha Moore’s For the Love of God: How The Church is Better And Worse Than You Ever Imagined was written in conjunction with John Dickson, Simon Smart and Justine Toh – Moore’s colleagues at the colleagues at the Sydney-based Centre for Public Christianity – and sits alongside a documentary of the same name.
Speaking at the online awards ceremony on Thursday night, Moore said she and the other authors hoped it was a book for “everyone”.
“We didn’t write it for Christians, we didn’t make the documentary for Christians…” she said, adding that the questions raised in the book – “Does religion do more harm than good? Is Christianity good for the world? Is the church? Does it play a valuable part in society or is it actually something that we would be better off without, something that is holding us back?” – are for all to consider.
“So if you have someone in your life who is kind of asking those questions and making those comments, there are really good reasons why they have that impression, and there are really good kind of ‘counter stories’ for them to take into account…” she said. “[U]ltimately we want to point people back to Jesus…”
The book was selected from a field of 10 short-listed books which included texts on Christian theology as well as histories, memoirs and a novel.
Among them were John Dickson’s book Is Jesus History?, Paul Barnett’s A Short Book About Paul: The Servant of Jesus, Tim Costello’s memoir A Lot With A Little and Anna McGahan’s Metanoia: A Memoir Of A Body, Born Again.
Others included Stuart Piggin and Robert Linder’s history, Attending To The National Soul: Evangelical Christians In Australian History 1914-2014, Samuel Green’s Where To Start With Islam?: A New Approach To Engaging With Muslim Friends, Chris Mulherin’s Science And Christianity, Ian Smith’s Not Home Yet: How The Renewal Of The Earth Fits Into God’s Plan For The World and P Howard Smith’s novel, I Will Avenge.
Other winners on the night included Daniel Li, winner of Australian Christian Young Writer for Being Mulaney, and Victorian Phoebe Worseldine, winner of the Australian Christian Teen Writer Award for Through Smoke and Flames.
Michael Collie, Sparklit’s national director, said the awards – now in their 40th year – celebrated the “creativity, courage and enterprise” of Christian writers in Australia and beyond.
The Australian Christian Book of the Year Award carries a prize of $AUD3000.
Correction: The prize amount was mistakenly written as being $US dollars. It is in Australian dollars.
