The latest installment in Brill’s A New History of the Sermon series offers innovative studies of sacred rhetoric in the nineteenth century. The three sections—Theory and Theology, Sermon and Society in the British Empire, and Sermon and Society in America—contain a total of sixteen essays on such topics as biblical criticism, Charles Darwin, the Oxford Movement, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), English Catholicism, sermon-novels, and the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic. Multiple traditions are represented, including the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, English nonconformity, Judaism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, making this a compilation that will appeal to a wide range of preachers, historians, literary scholars, and students of the rhetorical tradition. Contributors are Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Thomas J. Carmody, Dawn Coleman, Robert H. Ellison, Joseph Evans, Keith A. Francis, Brian Jackson, Dorothy Lander, Thomas H. Olbricht, Carol Poster, Mirela Saim, Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen, Bob Tennant, David M. Timmerman, Tamara S. Wagner, and John Wolffe.

The conventional portrayal of George Augustus Selwyn, the first Anglican bishop of New Zealand, focuses upon his significance as a missionary bishop who pioneered synodical government in New Zealand and acted as a mediator between settlers and Maori. George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878) focuses on Selwyn’s theological formation, which places him in the context of the world of traditional high churchmanship, rather than the Oxford Movement narrowly conceived. It argues that his distinctiveness lay in the way in which he was able to transplant his vision of Anglicanism to the colonial context. Making use of Selwyn’s personal correspondence and papers, as well as his unpublished sermons, the book analyses his theological formation, his missionary policy, his role within the formation of the colonial episcopate, his attitude to conciliar authority and his impact upon the diocesan revival in England. The study places Selwyn alongside other likeminded high churchmen who shaped the framework for the transformation of Anglicanism from State Church to worldwide communion in the nineteenth century.