THE latest book by Bishop Kenneth will be launched this Saturday (June 23).

‘Rooted in Detachment: Living the Transfiguration’, published by Darton, Longman and Todd, was written as he recovered from his first bout of leukaemia last year.

The transfiguration of Jesus is the original ‘mountain-top’ experience at which Jesus was shown to some of the disciples as the Son of God. The book explores each stage of the drama, as recounted in the gospels, and how these have been interpreted and used in worship and art down the ages. It also touches on the bishop’s own struggles with leukaemia, an experience that has helped to shape his own life.

The book launch takes place in Portsmouth’s Anglican Cathedral this Saturday (June 23) after a meeting of the diocesan synod, which is the decision-making forum of the diocese, at 9.30am and a Eucharist at 12.30pm. The books will be on sale for £10 each (the usual price is £10.95), and Bishop Kenneth will be available to sign copies.

The book has been praised by the former Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev Richard Harries, as: “a book to enrich both prayer and scholarship” and by John Anthony McGuckin, of Columbia University, New York, as: “a learned, spiritual, and charming engagement with the transfiguration narrative.”

And Maxwell E Johnson, from the University of Notre Dame in the USA, said: “Rooted in Detachment will be an indispensable source for spiritual reading, prayer, study, patristic and liturgical theology, and preaching.

“Drawing from his own transfiguring life experiences, including a bout with leukaemia, as well as such diverse sources as Eastern Christian iconography, Origen, Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom, Grundtvig, Jeremy Taylor, modern biblical scholarship, and others, Kenneth Stevenson shares with us his own disciplined lectio divina into which we are invited so that we may might contemplate and live the event and process of the transfiguration of Christ.”

The bishop was recently diagnosed with leukaemia for the third time, and expects to be given a second bone marrow transplant in July. The book launch is one of his last public engagements before his treatment.