Peter Hooton – författare

What does it feel like to be in the presence of God?This book examines the claims of direct religious experience and their role in shaping confidence in God’s relational nature. Drawing on theology, philosophy, and Christian meditative practice, it engages with classic thinkers such as Schleiermacher, William James, and Whitehead to explore whether human experience can transcend ordinary sensory life.Hooton gives prominence to a process view of the universe that weaves God and experience into the basic structure of reality; in doing so, it makes a compelling case for the authenticity of mystical perception and its significance for faith. It also addresses critiques of religious subjectivism, showing how these strengthen rather than weaken the case for divine–human interaction.Ideal for students, scholars, and anyone intrigued by the possibility of encountering God beyond the limits of sense perception.

Now also a new documentary film written and presented by Peter Hooton, The Boot Room Boys - BT Sport April 2022.The Boot Room story starts in 1959 when Bill Shankly arrived and converted a 12 x 12 storage room into a meeting place for him and his coaches, a move that had momentous consequences, both for the Club and British football. Fans on the Kop will remember the heart-stopping extra time of the 1965 FA Cup Final, and the jubilation of winning the treble in 1984. But what was the common thread during Liverpool's glory years? It was the Boot Room. Lifelong Liverpool supporter and editor of legendary fanzine The End, Peter Hooton takes us back into that old storage room, where first Shankly, then in succession Paisley, Fagan and Dalglish drank tea, analysed, strategised, selected and deselected, and built the most successful British club in Europe in the 20th Century. Illustrated throughout with over 100 powerful never-before-seen images from the Mirror's forgotten archives, The Boot Room Boys captures the story, as it unfolded, of Liverpool's conquering heroes.

A Theology of Divine Vulnerability: The Silence that Gives Light understands confidence in the idea of God to rest largely on three claims. The first is that God is responsible in some quite fundamental way for the existence of the universe—for the fact that there is anything at all. The second is that God’s own existence, and essential goodness, are not vitiated by the presence of evil in the world. And the third is that God knows we are here and shares fully, somehow, in the joys and pains of transient life. Peter Hooton considers these claims on the whole sympathetically. He prefers—to traditional Christian views of God’s omnipotence—a more nuanced understanding of God’s power and draws on a rich plurality of voices to describe God as much more loving than wrathful, as persuasive rather than coercive, as more passible than impassible, and the Christian’s relationship with God as essentially a compassionate participation in the reality signified by the crucified and risen Christ.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood Western civilization to be “approaching a completely religionless age” to which Christians must respond and adapt. This book explores Bonhoeffer’s own response to this challenge—his concept of a religionless Christianity—and its place in his broader theology. It does this, first, by situating the concept in a present-day Western socio-historical context. It then considers Bonhoeffer’s understanding and critique of religion, before examining the religionless Christianity of his final months in the light of his earlier Christ-centred theology. The place of mystery, paradox, and wholeness in Bonhoeffer’s thinking is also given careful attention, and non-religious interpretation is taken seriously as an ongoing task. The book aspires to present religionless Christianity as a lucid and persuasive contemporary theology; and does this always in the presence of the question which inspired Bonhoeffer’s theological journey from its academic beginnings to its very deliberately lived end—the question “Who is Jesus Christ?”