Description: The Oxford Movement transformed the nineteenth-century Church of England with a renewed conception of itself as a spiritual body. Initiated in the early 1830s by members of the University of Oxford, it was a response to threats to the established church posed by British Dissenters, Irish Catholics, Whig and Radical politicians, and the predominant evangelical ethos - what Newman called 'the religion of the day'. The Tractarians believed they were not simply addressing difficulties within their national Church, but recovering universal principles of the Christian faith. To what extent were their beliefs and ideals communicated globally? Was missionary activity the product of the movement's distinctive principles? Did their understanding of the Church promote, or inhibit, closer relations among the churches of the global Anglican Communion? This volume addresses these questions and more with a series of case studies involving Europe and the English-speaking world during the first century of the Movement.
Brief description: Dr Peter B. Nockles is curator and librarian in the department of Printed Books, Special Collections, John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, and Research Fellow in Religions and Theology, University of Manchester. He is the author of The Oxford Movement in Context (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Review Quotes: "... [an] effective collection of essays ... timely and to be welcomed ... It succeeds overall in providing a deeper and more nuanced understanding of an important part of the nineteenth-century Anglican identity."
Iain R. Torrance, The Expository Times