Church History
-
Celebrating Harvest and Christmas with Robert Hawker
I wrote this as we were preparing for our annual harvest festival at Pip and Jim’s church in Ilfracombe. In medieval England Lammas Day (1st August) was probably recognised as a thanksgiving for the first fruits of the harvest,...
Continue reading this entry → -
Blesséd be St Enodoc
A treasured memory of our holiday in Cornwall this summer was to stroll through St Enodoc Golf course, at Trebetherick, and revisit St. Enodoc Church. Situated in sand dunes east of Daymer Bay and Brea Hill on the River...
Continue reading this entry → -
Exeter’s cleverest bishop?
The longest serving Bishop of Exeter in the twentieth century was Robert Mortimer. When I arrived at the preparatory department of Exeter School in 1952, he had already been Bishop for three years and when I left the main school...
Continue reading this entry → -
The bishop and the calypso king
If you are as old as I am, you will remember the BBC satirical programme That Was The Week That Was, broadcast on Saturday evenings in 1962 and 1963. It was presented by David Frost and starred Millicent Martin,...
Continue reading this entry → -
Life as the sum of relationships
Has the lockdown made you reflect on the importance of friendship, our relationships to one another? One man who thought deeply about this was Mandell Creighton who succeeded Frederick Temple as Bishop of London in 1897. Temple said of...
Continue reading this entry → -
Should sermons be scripted?
Last month I wrote about G T Manley who, as a devout Christian, came top of the list of mathematics graduates at Cambridge in 1893, beating the atheist Bertrand Russell. Another very clever Christian was (my hero) Frederick Temple...
Continue reading this entry → -
Do very clever people believe in God?
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist and Nobel laureate. There is no doubt that he was very clever. So much so that he achieved the distinction, when the results of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos were...
Continue reading this entry → -
In the footsteps of St Cuthbert
Although we hadn’t intended it, a holiday Sheila and I enjoyed at the end of May and the beginning of June turned into something of pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Cuthbert. But we didn’t do it in the right...
Continue reading this entry → -
What was the bishop doing in Ilfracombe?
Lord William Cecil was the second son of the former Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. His time at Oxford, which he enjoyed, suggested that he may not have inherited his father’s brains since he only managed a third class degree in...
Continue reading this entry → -
Sights that dazzle
When John Ernest Bode’s daughter and two sons were confirmed in 1866 he wanted the service to include a memorable hymn. Presumably because he couldn’t find one which was quite good enough, he decided to write his own. The...
Continue reading this entry →
