The first study of lay people and parish clergy in the nineteenth-century Church of England.

Through their teaching of early Christian history and theology, Elizabeth A. Clark contends, Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary functioned as America's closest equivalents to graduate schools in the humanities during the nineteenth century. These four Protestant institutions, founded to train clergy, later became the cradles for the nonsectarian study of religion at secular colleges and universities. Clark, one of the world's most eminent scholars of early Christianity, explores this development in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Based on voluminous archival materials, the book charts how American theologians traveled to Europe to study in Germany and confronted intellectual currents that were invigorating but potentially threatening to their faith. The Union and Yale professors in particular struggled to tame German biblical and philosophical criticism to fit American evangelical convictions. German models that encouraged a positive view of early and medieval Christianity collided with Protestant assumptions that the church had declined grievously between the Apostolic and Reformation eras. Trying to reconcile these views, the Americans came to offer some counterbalance to traditional Protestant hostility both to contemporary Roman Catholicism and to those historical periods that had been perceived as Catholic, especially the patristic era.

Greatly to be welcomed. This meticulously researched and richly documented account provides fresh insights into theological controversy and social prejudice and should be read by all serious students of the Victorian Church.Greatly to be welcomed. Richard Sharp The Rev. Dr John Hunt (1827-1907) was not a typical clergyman in the Victorian Church of England. He was Scottish, of lowly birth, and lacking both social connections and private means. He was also a witty and fluent intellectual, whose publications stood alongside the most eminent of his peers during a period when theology was being redefined in the light of Darwin’s Origin of Species and other radical scientific advances. Hunt attracted notoriety and conflict as well as admiration and respect: he was the subject of articles in Punch and in the wider press concerning his clandestine dissection of a foetus in the crypt of a City church, while his Essay on Pantheism was proscribed by the Roman Catholic Church. He had many skirmishes with incumbents, both evangelical and catholic, and was dismissed from several of his curacies. This book analyses his career in London and St Ives (Cambs.) through the lens of his autobiographical narrative, Clergymen Made Scarce (1867). David Yeandle has examined a little-known copy of the text that includes manuscript annotations by Eliza Hunt, the wife of the author, which offer unique insight into the many anonymous and pseudonymous references in the text. A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt is an absorbing personal account of the corruption and turmoil in the Church of England at this time. It will appeal to anyone interested in this history, the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century, or the role of the curate in Victorian England.

In the 1880s, socio-economic and technological changes in the United States contributed to the rejection of Christian architectural traditions and the development of the radically new auditorium church. Jeanne Kilde links this shift in evangelical Protestant architecture to changes in worship style and religious mission.

Changing social and cultural strategies pursued by Protestant and Catholic religious institutions have shaped the social order in Quebec and English Canada. Through a sustained comparison of Protestantism and Catholicism, this volume explores the transition from pre-industrial to industrial society and challenges conventional chronologies of religious change.

Roman Catholic church music in England served the needs of a vigorous, vibrant and multi-faceted community that grew from about 70,000 to 1.7 million people during the long nineteenth century. This book provides a framework of the main aspects of Catholic church music in this period showing how and why it developed in the way it did. Dr Muir sets the music in its proper historical, liturgical and legal context pointing to the ways in which the music itself can be used as evidence to throw light on the changing character of English Catholicism.

Marks the centenary of the Church in Wales and critically assesses landmarks in its evolution.

The book retraces the history of the Church of England from the Henrician schism (1533–34) to the present day, and focuses on the complex relations between the Church and the State which, in the case of an established Church, are of paramount importance. Theological questions, and in particular the conflicting influences of Catholicism and Protestantism, in its various forms, are also examined. The religious settlement engineered by Elizabeth I and her advisers in the 16th century saved England from the atrocities of religious war. However, the countless theological battles and party feuds which have punctuated the history of the Church suggest that the Elizabethan settlement was not entirely successful. The Church of England today is a “broad Church”, hosting within its fold a wide range of traditions and beliefs. The coexistence between liberals and conservatives and, to a lesser extent, between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals, remains uneasy and the unity of the Church is fragile. The Church of England, whose increasingly vague doctrine and multifaceted liturgy can be baffling, is furthermore confronted with other pressing challenges, such as the rapidly growing secularization of British society and the issue of disestablishment, which are seriously undermining its role and influence as a national Church.