As the years go by, an increasing number of students in my religious studies classes report being too busy to have time to reflect on spirituality in their daily lives. If you’ve had similar exasperating experiences in your daily lives, your teaching, or your ministerial careers, then Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion is the book for you.
The subtitle of Ash’s work does not name Christianity, though this is her explicit goal, since Christianity is the tradition with which the author is most familiar. Readers should be aware that Ash’s account is one person’s earnest spiritual search; it is not a diatribe or a systematic exposition of modern Christianity. At the outset, Ash describes her initial “unquestioned assumptions about Christianity, that it was . . . endemically misogynistic and homophobic, permanently stained by its status as a colonial handmaiden, a breeding ground for paedophiles” (2). Yet Ash is passionately curious and becomes personally involved in active Christian groups. The book is based on interviews with over sixty people conducted between 2021 and 2024, drawn from a wide range of Christian traditions across the United Kingdom. Ironically for a book review publication, Ash could teach scholars of modern religion a thing or two about putting books aside and actively engaging with people in the field.
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever is broken into three parts. Part 1 details Ash’s engagement with more conservative versions of Christianity, which at first may seem to conform to the stereotypes she herself held at the outset of her exploration. She interviews Catholic believers, an Orthodox catechumen, and several members of growing Evangelical churches. Any factual errors are minor and reflect her status as a seeker, not yet an expert. For example, in her brief interactions with Max, a hyper-masculine Orthodox catechumen, she refers to meeting after “Mass” at St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Bayswater, London (68). The main Orthodox services are never referred to as a Mass but as a Divine Liturgy. As an Orthodox Christian, I frequently hear such slips of the tongue, but I never take them insultingly, but rather as part of the learning-seeking process.
Part 2 describes what Ash calls the “quiet, desert periods” during which she could “take a sidestep from the onward track” of her life (15). I found part 2 to be the most rewarding and poetic of the book. While still in the hubbub of urban London, Ash evocatively describes the quiet of waiting for the Inner Light at Quaker meetings. Further afield, Ash participates in a retreat on the Hebridean island of Iona, the Triduum retreat with the Sisters of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk, and a Gerard Manley Hopkins-themed retreat at the St. Beuno’s Jesuit Spirituality Centre in North Wales. Ash deftly juxtaposes the solitariness of her retreats with the growing joy she finds in belonging in communities of devotion.
Part 3 focuses on individual portraits of people she met along the way whose lives were changed by and through faith experiences. The subjects described in the final section, according to Ash, are what “ultimately changed my relationship with belief” (15). Like Ash herself, transformed through witnessing others’ transformations, my views on young people’s relationship to Christianity were changed by reading Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever.
Ash’s style throughout the book is simultaneously detailed, incisive, and vulnerable. Her initial idea for the project came from two university friends who decided to become priests but were performing as stand-up comedians as she was writing. Indeed, performance is a motif that recurs throughout Ash’s spiritual journey. She uses the term in two ways: performance as merely going through the motions and performance as authentic, fulfilling engagement. Ash did not merely consult archives or ponder religion in solitude; instead, she performed rituals alongside other seekers and members of religious communities. Her initial forays were fake-it-till-you-make-it performances carried out with ironic self-awareness. By the end, however, she is no longer just a seeker, and her book becomes an account of her journey toward ministry: “My ministry was a performance. At the same time, it was as close to truth as I could get” (270).
The importance of liturgy is implicit throughout Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever. Ash infrequently uses the term “liturgy” itself, and only when referring to rites-and-rubrics descriptions of Christian worship services. Yet I found Ash reminiscent of Mrs. Murphy, a hypothetical parishioner in the work of theologian Aidan Kavanagh. Mrs. Murphy doesn’t read theology but has been theologically formed by liturgical participation. To Kavanagh, Mrs. Murphy is a liturgist because her “faith is carried on not by concepts and propositions nearly so much as in the vastly complex vocabulary of experiences had, prayers said, sights seen, smells smelled, words said and heard and responded to, emotions controlled and released, sins committed and repented” (On Liturgical Theology, Liturgical Press, 1984; 147). In Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, Ash is a liturgist par excellence: “Not every time, but most times, after taking communion I felt a further unlocking, even a coming together of the disparate parts of my life. I don’t know what to do about this fact. I don’t know how to articulate it appropriately. But the sacramental aspect of the bread and the wine changed me a little every week” (280).
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever is light on statistics, sociology, and anthropology in diagnosing modern religion. But the book will be of great benefit to scholars seeking works on spiritual formation, pastoral counseling, relationships, studies of secularism, pedagogy, and modern Christian movements. Ash’s work might be most appealing to young people who desire some form of enchantment, wonder, and belonging in the modern world. I’m no longer young, but I’m tempted to make a new search for religion myself, with Ash’s work as my guide.
David Greder is an associate professor of religion and philosophy at Waldorf University.
David Greder
Date Of Review:
May 30, 2026
