Author Archives: revjmorris

            Some people may be surprised that I want to lay claim to John Henry Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons as an ‘Anglican classic’.  After all, Newman converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and as his spiritual autobiography, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) made clear, this was not a sudden or hasty, unprepared change,Continue reading “Revisiting Anglican classics 3: Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons”

            My first book of poetry was a Puffin book of children’s verse, with a light blue cover; I enjoyed poking around in it, but I can remember very little else about it.  Poetry disappeared from my life in early adolescence, but reappeared at ‘O’ level with passages from the Prelude, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, andContinue reading “The faith of poetry and the poetry of faith”

            Is this the greatest book of Anglican theology published in the twentieth century?  I think there’s a good case for saying so.  It’s certainly one of the most influential, and a book which retains much of its freshness and vitality 85 years on from its publication.              It’s not without flaws.  So let’s getContinue reading “Revisiting Anglican Classics 2: A.M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (1936)”

We can’t talk about love if we can’t also talk about sacrifice.  This seems so obvious to me that I’m not sure I’ve ever really tried to formulate it explicitly before.  But it is the way talk of love in contemporary discourse slips so easily into the assumption that love serves self-fulfilment which has struckContinue reading “The demands of love”

            Anglicans have generally welcomed Newman’s canonisation in 2019 with acclaim, in my view rightly so – as you’ll see.  But there is an irony in this.  Anglicans cannot really claim to have been ahead of the Roman Catholic Church in seeing Newman as a saint.  Few Anglicans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesContinue reading “St. John Henry Newman – a saint for Anglicans?”

            I imagine most people will look askance at the title of this post.  What has politics got to do with pastoral care?  Isn’t pastoral care something intensely and essentially personal, so that politics shouldn’t get in the way of it?  Well yes…and no.             Yes, because Christian ministry can’t be parcelled up into differentialContinue reading “The politics of pastoral encounter”

            When I was at theological college in the early 1990s, Bill Vanstone’s book was spoken of with awe, as a profound essay on the risk of love.  I think because of that reputation, I held off from reading it for years, fearing I’d be disappointed.  But I needn’t have done.  It is an extraordinaryContinue reading “Revisiting Anglican classics 1: W.H. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense (1977)”