A new face for CHBookshop.co.uk, Dougald Hine is a freelance journalist, writer and activist based in Sheffield. That means one half of his life is spent in newsrooms, but the other half in "marginal" spaces - activist groups, churches, arts projects and non-traditional learning environments.

Dougald is currently working on a short book about events surrounding the G8 summit at Gleneagles. This will consider the ways in which the division between "good" and "bad" protestors is constructed by politicians and the media, and the extent to which it is internalised by protestors, as well as the correspondences between this process and the language of the "war on terror". This has grown out of direct involvement with activism in Sheffield, including most recently a project to set up a social centre in a former industrial building in the city's Cultural Industries Quarter. He is also researching a longer-term project which will examine the roots of the sexuality debate in the Anglican Communion in changes in economic culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

Dougald worships at the Late Service at St Mark's, Broomhill, and is involved with Thank God It's Friday, 'a monthly city centre space for people who live in and puzzle over the world today'.

Are you ready to read about the books that inspire him? Find out what's on Dougald's Bookshelf:

This is one of the most inspiring and challenging books I know. For Alastair McIntosh, faith is a call to action: from the struggle of the Eigg islanders to buy their home, to the campaign that stopped the Roineabhal superquarry on the Isle of Harris, he has worked with communities to assert their right to determine their own future. In a time when market forces often seem irresistible, Alastair's work offers practical examples of another kind of power in action.

Reading Soil and Soul is like one of those fantastic conversations you can occasionally have with a total stranger. It's not a rant about what's wrong with the world, but a personal story which leads from his memories of a childhood in the Outer Hebrides to his work today in inner city Glasgow. A Quaker who spent a number of years working for the Iona Community, he has no time for a God who is kept safely in church. (Opposing the Harris quarry, he made legal history by organising the first theological testimony to a public enquiry.)

Some will find his openness to other religious traditions challenging, but what comes across throughout the book is a generosity of spirit, coupled with a remarkable ability to move between different worlds.

One of Alastair's worlds has been academia, where he was director of the Centre for Human Ecology, which was closed down by Edinburgh University for upsetting corporate investors. (The Centre has been revived independently and is now accredited by the Open University.)

The theologian Richard Roberts has had similarly painful experience of the managerial "reform" of higher education. This leads him to write about the wider process by which all aspects of our lives, including our spirituality, are increasingly subject to such reform. (Indeed, he accuses the Church of England of imitating this process where it should challenge it.)

Unlike Soil and Soul, this is definitely a book of academic theology - there's a passage on Hegel in chapter 5 that will tax most of us! But it is practical theology, much of it clearly written and relevant beyond the limits of the campus. And, taken together, the essays in this book give glimpses of Roberts' personal journey: from a traditional position within the church and the university, to a radical vision which combines pessimism about current institutions with hope for new forms of renewal.

Hamilton doesn't write as a Christian, but the story he tells of the widening gap between people's material lifestyles and their sense of wellbeing is one we should be listening to. The pursuit of economic growth has, he argues, become a destructive cult in which people are reduced to 'consumption machines'. But, as this intensifies, people are increasingly seeking a means of escape.

This is a book in which argument is backed up with facts and figures. Hamilton has done research on the phenomenon of 'down-shifting': people choosing to move to lower-paid or part-time work in order to create more space in their lives. He also draws attention to the 'neglected body of research' exploring the links between religion and happiness. Given the anti-religious bent of much mainstream social science, this is interesting stuff.

Growth Fetish isn't a light read, but it is written for a non-specialist audience and is a clear and persuasive introduction to some of the most important issues our societies face. I believe Hamilton's analysis should give us confidence about the role the church can play in meeting the needs of 21st century people.

Philip Wilson's book, on the other hand, presents a sobering picture of the brokenness that often exists within our churches. In a series of in-depth interviews with single Christians of all ages, he uncovers an experience of church life often characterised by stress and pain. Far from being known by our love, 'most congregations today seem to have little or no idea of how to conduct good interpersonal relationships'.

This is not a book aimed at single people. Wilson's point is that the experience of single Christians confronts us with challenges for the church as a whole. It's not a comfortable read - there is too much that is familiar here. But the recognition of brokenness can be the beginning of healing, a process which is needed in the world as well as in the church.

Wilson is particularly good in his survey of the history of Christianity and singleness. Too often, present change is debated as if the past had been static, setting up a fruitless conflict between Tradition and Progress. Writing about the changes in attitude to marriage that have accompanied different periods of church history, he conjures up the quieting strangeness of the past.

If our churches are poor at 'interpersonal relationships', it is perhaps in part because we have conceded too much, too often, to those who see religion as a set of ideas about the nature of reality.

Secularism – the loss of understanding of what religion is for - is not a problem that began with the 1960's nose dive in Sunday attendance, but the product of several centuries of western history. When our evangelism or our internal dialogue is conducted as an attempt to reason the other into submission, we have internalised this secular attitude.

Chesterton's book, first published in 1923, is a passionate portrait of the strangeness of St Francis for a world that thinks in such terms: 'Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea… To this great mystic his religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair.'

Although Chesterton's style is old-fashioned enough to be strange in itself, the book reads like a love story, or even a set of love letters. In that sense, it belongs with Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and with those songs by Nick Cave in which the languages of love and prayer shift in and out of one another.

Many people remember John Berger for his 1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing - or else for winning the Booker prize in the same year and giving half his prize money to the Black Panthers. His political commitment has hardly softened since his days as a fiery Marxist art critic at the New Statesman, but it has acquired new dimensions.

Thirty years ago, he settled in a village in the Haute Savoie where the last generation of French peasants were still living much as their families had for centuries. His later work has been shaped by a dialogue with the culture he found there, its folk Catholicism rooted in an (often harsh) closeness to the soil and the seasons.

Many of his books are unclassifiable, and if Here is where we meet has been published as a novel, this is a way of rendering it safe. It is the story of a series of encounters with the ghosts of people he has known, directly or through their work. He writes, as always, with the combination of a painter's eye, a migrant's torn-ness and the commitment of a resistance fighter. (Among his admirers are Jeanette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy.)

One aspect of Berger's recent writing seems to trouble even many of his admirers. In stories and essays, the individual and collective presence of 'the dead' becomes increasingly important. I have read this referred to as a 'literary device', but never by Berger himself. It seems to me, rather, that the closeness of the dead in Berger's understanding of reality returns to us something of what the doctrine of purgatory can mean.