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Island Aflame by Tom Lennie


Finished reading this today. It is subtitled: The Famed Lewis Awakening that Never Occurred and the Glorious Revival that Did. I greatly enjoyed it. Written in what I suppose is a journalistic style, Mr Lennie manages to straddle the sceptical but sympathetic line (something I hgenerally aim at myself) as he seeks to explore the revivals in the Hebrides under Duncan Campbell in the late forties and early fifties. You cannot move in the (Reformed evangelical( circles I move in without hearing at some point about Duncan Campbell and the revival in the Hebrides - the two sisters who prayed, the sense of Gpd, the conversions, etc. What this book does, very helpfully, is to try and untangle fact from fiction, truth from exaggeration. It is meticulous and completes the task, I felt, very well, destroying the myth but preserving the core truths of what was undoubtedly a work of God. It means admitting that Duncan Cambell was a pathological liar and that the Free Church made some big mistakes but this sounds much more like what happened than anything else available. Check it out.

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