Challenging and informative though the topic of love can be, you will be all the better for reading and absorbing how it has the capability and power to turn the world Upside Down and Right Side up through the care, compassion and the Love of one for another.

It is a pleasure to be warmly commending a new book that offers a vibrant and fresh form of spirituality that shows every sign of being contemporary yet classic. It is rooted in the best traditions of orthodox liberal Anglicanism. Readers of Ogden will find resonances with Richard Holloway’s early work; or with Bill Countryman’s Truth About Love. The central idea that Ogden works with is love – in all its manifestations. Rooted in the proposition that Jesus is subversive, and that all our preconceptions need testing and turning upside down.

This book would make an excellent volume for study in groups. It is wise, probing and sharp – yet highly accessible, and challenging and consoling in equal measures. Ogden has a fresh and original style of writing, that manages to combine theological acuity with pastoral and spiritual wisdom. Love Upside Down is a book that reaches out to a wider world, beyond the church. It also reaches into the church, and calls us to a more responsible and holistic form of discipleship, rooted in the love of God for humanity and the whole of created order. Ogden has an uncanny gift for weaving stories together with provocative insights, fresh ideas, biblical commentary and spiritual counsel. This is a book that somehow confronts and uplifts: in the best orthodox liberal vein.

Well worth reading. What is most attractive about it, and in the end most engaging, is that it is ultimately about the radical difference that love brings to people, the Church, and the world.  

Topsy-turvy and upside down are the best ways to describe the reactions of most Christian churches to the shocking discovery that human sexual variations are just part of the normal diversity in nature. Suddenly the world can see that hating gays is as wrong as hating blacks, left-handers and women. Steven Ogden has written a lucid prescription on what the churches need to do, in the words of the young, to ‘get real’. His book should be sent to every prelate for Christmas.

This love is not something theoretical or abstract but about loving the world openly and courageously, about looking at everything and everyone from within the horizon of love, whether different or marginalized people or the violated earth. Steven Ogden uses everyday and ordinary examples to show how this upside down love works, suggesting that everything in the universe is an experience of loving, if we look at it in this way, and with this expectation. God is thus not the old man in the sky, but the Divine ''infusing and enlivening experience."

Love that sees this way turns orthodox rules on their heads and helps us see the other, whether LGBT people, the environment or the stranger, as objects of love. It not only turns the world upside down but brings the downside up by recognizing the invisible ones. It changes our view of Jesus, no longer meek and mild, but a ''counter-cultural prophet of justice and a teacher of love.

I would urge you to read this beautiful, honest, often whimsical but always practical, book to energize and inspire you once again to the possibilities of radical loving.

The author is systematic in his method, and well informed by extensive reading in recent theology and cultural studies. Ogden's conversational style allows him to carry his learning lightly, almost imperceptibly introducing the reader to a gentle and generous vision of Christian faith and life. This is Christian apologetic for a wide audience in the tradition of CS Lewis and the popularising of serious theology in the manner of JAT Robinson, but with an Australian flavour and updated for the twenty-first century. Steven Ogden's book deserves to be read by anyone, Christian or not, interested in love.

Writing in the tradition of Richard Holloway's "Doubts and Loves", Steven Ogden has written a heart-searching exploration of the Christian understanding of what it means to love. This is honest, raw theology, which is unfortunately eschewed by so many academics and Christian writers. In the process, Ogden desanitizes Jesus; and gets down and dirty in the real world of human relationships and Western society. At times it is confronting, but so is love. At times it is uplifting, but then so is love. My advice: read it and discuss it. Out of the dialogue and conversation, perhaps we too may learn to love each other.

Steven Ogden combines his love of Christianity, his research into a humble man known as Jesus and modern day changes in society, to present an almost confrontational look and persuasive argument into what is accepted as love by the modern 21st century thinkers and members of today’s world. Challenging and informative though the topic can be, you will be all the better for reading and absorbing that not only is love the stuff of poets, but that it can also place the world upside down and right side up through care, compassion and love of one for another, making you richer for the experience.

Steven Ogden’s latest book focuses on the nature of love and its centrality to the Christian message. It is no mushy feel good story, but is littered with anecdotes of the nature of love and how it can beguile us and lift us up, all the while making fools of us. For example, early on he talks about an encounter at a summer holiday camp in which the awareness of love hits. It is a poignant story about the wonder, ecstasy and tragic fragility of young love. It is this earthiness that makes Ogden’s writing radically incarnational. That is, the presence of divine love is experienced with an immediacy through our everyday experiences of love, justice and compassion.

You’ll be disappointed in Love Upside Down if you expect to find something you missed in the Kama Sutra! Steven Ogden’s starting point is a late Iron Age activist named Jesus, a subversive who “caused great scandal in the name of love”. Engaging, reflective and challenging. ~ David Boulton, author, The Trouble with God and Who on Earth was Jesus?

Steven G Ogden stirs up amidst the messiness of life the “exquisite moments of love” that change us – our perceptions and our behaviors. And as we are turned upside down we acquire new eyes with which to take others seriously. Ogden gets very personal: we not only change our regard for ourselves but also acquire the kind of love that can change the world. As he shows, even if love cannot “cure all that ails… it can help us live with dignity and hope.”

Love is one of the most abused words in contemporary language. And yet love lies at the heart of religious faith and is at the very center of what it means to understand and practice the presence of God, and live life after the example of Jesus. In this profound, wise and probing book, Steven Ogden opens up new vistas on the meanings of love for the shaping of our faith. Alternately challenging and comforting, we are brought face to face with the simple yet radical message of the gospel. This is a stimulating and refreshing book that will inspire all who those seek to deepen their discipleship in today's world. ~ Martyn Percy, Principal, Ripon College Cuddesdon and The Oxford Ministry Course

In the tradition of Richard Holloway’s Doubts and Loves, Steven Ogden has written a heart searching exploration of the Christian understanding of what it means to love. In the process he has re-evaluated how we love as Christians and what that is in relation to living in postmodernity. Ogden has desanitized Jesus and got down and dirty in the real world. He has not flinched from tackling the serious theological and ethical issues that confront Christians today. This is honest, raw theology which is unfortunately eschewed by so many academics and Christian writers. This book is not only confronting but uplifting as well. My advice – read it!

What is love? At its heart is a wondering seeing of another person – seeing them in their full reality as if for the very first time. To see in this way is impossible unless we are willing to be vulnerable, above all to be vulnerable to the otherness of the Other. And to be this vulnerable is impossible unless we have learned in some measure to love and accept ourselves. So Steven Ogden shows the inner logic of Jesus' commandment that we love one another as we love ourselves. In this accessible and daring book Steven Ogden shows how the quirky kingdom preached by Jesus can change our world with the power of love and challenges the church to live as if it really is the foretaste of that new reality. ~ Sarah Bachelard, Lecturer in Theology, St Mark's National Theological Centre, Charles Sturt University