'I have been making an experiment..' said Garth Lean to a friend as he walked into his Oxford college one day in 1932. That was the beginning of his journey into faith, an adventure which still continues forty years later. ‘You damned fool!’ shouted the friend, and through the years some have scoffed while others have followed up Lean’s experiment with surprising results. In this book we meet a fascinating range of characters—writers, unemployed, students and politicians—many of them closely involved in the ideological struggle that has raged before, during and since World War II.
Garth Lean’s books have already sold over six hundred thousand copies. Now Lean tells of his own search for a faith and life-style relevant to this age. The story starts with the shock of the hunger-marchers’ arrival in Oxford, moves through America, Europe and Asia, and back to Oxford where he now lives and where his son and daughter studied in the turbulent sixties and seventies. He writes of marriage, family life, journalism and the personal crisis of illness. Chapters include: ‘Is the generation gap compulsory?’, ‘Student revolutionaries’, ‘What to do with fear ?’, ‘What about money ?’.
In a sense his is an ordinary life, but it is full of the zest of the unexpected—not because of extraordinary circumstances but because it is lived boldly. Life, he says, is a series of experiments. ‘Each incurs a risk, and faith flags unless such risks are taken day by day.’
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