THE 2026 Bloomsbury Lent Book is Easter in Disguise by Liz Dodd. Her first sentence is “I used to hate Lent.” But, in this brilliant and challenging course, the author shows in an imaginative way, the power of Christ’s resurrection and teaching, permeating each Sunday’s Lenten reading.
Dodd is a Sister of the Congregation of St Joseph of Peace, a community dedicated to prayer and radical social action. She has written in The Sunday Times about her three great loves: travel, spirituality, and beer — just what one would want in a nun, perhaps most of the time. Her writing is beautiful, and her theology is profound, inspired by Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, South American liberation theology, and Pope Francis. And she provides a great challenge to all Christians with her prophetic commitment based on Jesus’s teaching for the poor, marginalised, and excluded: those whom Jesus regarded as central to his mission.
The structure of the book is extremely helpful for individual readers or groups. It starts with an introduction by way of Ash Wednesday, but then the main part takes the set readings for each Sunday in Lent and explores them with imagination and the lens of Christian social action. For example, the temptations in the desert traditionally have been interpreted as the devil’s attempt to divert Jesus as Son of God from his divine mission for the salvation of humanity. But Dodd interprets it as Satan’s confrontation of Jesus over the three most powerful threats to the human condition. Jesus’s rejection of the temptations shows, rather, his complete solidarity with humanity.
Then, after each biblical study, the author forcefully goes on to show how it should be applied to the life of each Christian and the Church. In this example, how are we to show our solidarity with the most vulnerable? Then, each chapter ends with a series of interesting and demanding questions. Also what is excellent is that each chapter has a different spiritual exercise — to pray about what has been read and what has been discussed.
Dodd uses for the six Lenten Sundays what she regards as the six critical spiritualities that Jesus Christ gives us through his gospel. As I have already mentioned, the spirituality of solidarity is linked to the temptations. Then there is poverty, linked to transfiguration; downward mobility, linked to the woman at the well; hospitality, linked to the healing of the man born blind; non-violence, linked to the raising of Lazarus; and resistance, linked to the entry into Jerusalem and the Passion. The book ends with Dodd’s hopeful reflections on the Easter Triduum, and her profound sense that, however dark the world is becoming, God will not let us go.
The Ven. Dr Lyle Dennen is Archdeacon Emeritus of Hackney, in east London.
Easter in Disguise: The 2026 Lent Book
Liz Dodd
Bloomsbury £10.99
(978-1-3994-1977-2)
Church Times Bookshop £8.79
