Church History
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Henry Chadwick and the road to happiness
Henry Chadwick (1920 –2008) was an academic, a theologian, a Church of England priest, a dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford – and as such, head of Christ Church, Oxford – and also, later, master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. A...
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China: a crunch question
Today, as I write this, the headline in a daily political podcast is: ‘The crunch China question. Should Britain turn to megaphone diplomacy and economic disengagement?’ Apparently Rishi Sunak believes not. In September 1853, at the age of just...
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Why Fletcher of Madeley turned down promotion
John William Fletcher (1729-85) was not English. His real name was Jean Guillaume de la Flechѐre, but as his English friends could never spell this correctly he consented to be known as John William Fletcher. Born in Switzerland, he...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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