Tod Jones provides an exhaustive and up-to-date synthesis of primary and secondary materials on the Broad Church movement, surveying the mainstream of British liberal religious thought and the foundations of the British literary canon from Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. This book will prove very useful for students of religion and literature alike.
Victor Shea, York University, Co-editor (with William ... Read moreWhitla), Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and its Readings Anyone who admits to find gripping a history of an intellectual movement within the Victorian church risks being thought to lead a rather unsatisfactory life. Truth is, though, that Dr. Jones' biography of the Broad Church is compelling and succeeds in raising questions still fit to disturb Christian and clerical complacencies. Dr. Jones' choice of biography as the form in which to discuss this movement is superbly appropriate to appreciate a tradition marked much less by stable beliefs than by an enduring character. Its most influential theologian, F. D. Maurice, who insisted that if "Broad Church" meant anything, it meant not a party, would surely have approved. As Tod Jones understands it, the Broad Church movement was, at its best, a sober and sympathetic appreciation of modernity by clergy and laity who, at the same time, were not "ashamed of the gospel." This "biography of a movement" is persuasive in its weaving of personal histories and intellectual developments, negotiates very nimbly the complexities of English university and ecclesiastical politics, and expounds the range of theological ideas from Maurice's ecumenical Christology to Matthew Arnold's taking leave of theism with great clarity and, as befits a biography, affection.
Alan Gregory, Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest; author of Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination As an Episcopalian who stands with one foot in the Evangelical tradition and the other in Liberal reasonableness, I am grateful for this luxurious group portrait of English intellectual forbears I never knew I had.
Richard J. Jones, Virginia Theological Seminary Jones reveals the interconnections between all these personalities, through family and university, through shared thoughts and feelings, reminding one in fascinating ways of the small size of the ecclesiastical, literary, and political establishment in the Victorian era.
Anglican Theological Review
. . . .The Broad Church successfully and creatively re-imagines a host of once prominent English thinkers whose own struggle to engage both church and society may still provide an enriching source of theological reflection.
Jeffrey W. Barbeau, Oral Roberts University
Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture
Through remarkably wide reading of the sources and an intricate connecting of personal relationships [Tod Jones] has produced what now constitutes the single best introduction to liberal Victorian Anglican theology. It is an important accomplishment that should have lasting influence among all scholars interested in Victorian intellectual, religious, and literary life.
Frank Turner, John Hay Whitney Professor of History, Yale University Tod Jones has produced an engaging and informative history of the Broad Church Movement…a deeply nuanced account of intellectual and spiritual revival of the nineteenth-century churcg.
Anglican and Episcopal History
This is, perhaps, the first book-length account of Victorian Church controversies written by an American specifically for an American audience, and it is precisely that outsider's view that is valuable.
Victorian Studies
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