Rachel Mann: Lent with Elton John

Canon Rachel Mann has written a Lent course on an unlikely topic: Still Standing: a Lent Course based on the Elton John movie Rocketman (DLT) (Books, 22 January). It’s available to buy from the Church Times Bookshop for £6.29. Ed Thornton caught up with Rachel this week to find out more about the course. “Rocketman is not about Elton John’s conversion to Christianity — I don’t know quite what he thinks about Christianity,” Rachel says. “But what it is about is about a human being coming to terms with the depths of his need, with the way in which he’s lived a life of profound excess and damage and brokenness, and that need for healing. And gosh isn’t that a story all of us can perhaps wrestle with — our grit and our grace, our brokenness and our holiness.” Rachel will be talking about her debut novel, The Gospel of Eve (Books, 27 November 2020), at a one-day Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature event being held online on Saturday 20 February. Other speakers include Francis Spufford, whose eagerly anticipated second novel, Light Perpetual, has recently been published; Kathy Tiernan; and Mark Oakley. Book tickets at https://faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk/buy-tickets/ Canon Rachel Mann is Rector of St Nicholas’s, Burnage, and Visiting Fellow of Manchester Met University. Find out about forthcoming Church Times online events at www.churchtimes.co.uk/events. Sign up to receive our email newsletter at churchtimes.co.uk/newsletter-signup Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader. Picture credit: KT BRUCE