Open Peer Review: a glimpse of the future ?

Dipping one's toe tentatively into the new world of Open Peer Review, a draft paper of mine on archbishop Michael Ramsey is now available for comment and criticism at the History Working Papers Project. The idea is that HWPP can re-create the interchange of a seminar online, with readers commenting on the paper as a whole and on individual paragraphs, with an opportunity for the author to respond, and post revised versions for subsequent rounds of review. More on the HWPP project is available here, and there is some interesting thinking about the direction in which peer review might go by Jane Winters of the IHR.

I am sure that the creators of the HWPP would be delighted to have as many scholars as possible, from every specialism, try to use the site and let them have any feedback.

This particular paper examines the petitions that were made to Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, to call a national day of prayer. It considers the grounds upon which the petitions was made, and the Church’s official reactions to them. In doing so, it sheds light from an unaccustomed angle onto attitudes towards petitionary prayer among some of the British public, on understandings of the role of the archbishop as leader of the nation’s religious life, and of the recent providential history of the nation, particularly during the 1939-45 war.

CHF November Conference: Beyond 1611

The next CHF day conference will be held at St Peter's Vere Street on Saturday 12th November. Our subject is 'Beyond 1611: How the Bible Shaped British Culture'.

The quatercentenary of the King James Bible has focussed largely on the creation of this famous translation. But in recent years, historians and literary scholars have been making exciting new discoveries about the impact of the English Bible on British political and literary culture. This conference showcases some of this new research. The four lectures by experts in the field tell the story of how the Bible captured the British imagination from the seventeenth-century revolutions to the Victorians and beyond. A closing roundtable discussion will consider what contemporary Christians can learn from the Bible’s reception history.

10:30: Tea and Coffee
10:50 Welcome from John Coffey

11.00: Nick Spencer (Research Director, Theos): The Political Bible
12.00: Prof John Coffey (University of Leicester): The Abolitionist Bible

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00: Dr Jon Roberts (University of Liverpool): The Romantic Bible
3.00: Dr Mark Knight (University of Roehampton): The Victorian Bible

4.00-4.45: Roundtable: The Use and Abuse of the English Bible

The conference fee is £7.50 (or £5 for students, retired, non-salaried)
To book a place, please email John Coffey at jrdc1@le.ac.uk or write to him at School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH. Cheques should be made payable to 'Christianity and History Forum', though it is possible to pay on the day.

Sir Herbert Butterfield

Readers of this blog will no doubt know of Herbert Butterfield's lectures on Christianity and History, originally published in 1949. The Cambridge professor (and Methodist lay preacher) has been the subject of a number of studies, including C.T. McIntire's Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (2004), but his public image will never look quite the same after Michael Bentley's new work, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield (CUP, 2011). Bentley has unearthed a set of private letters written by the historian to a woman with whom he had a passionate affair in the mid-1930s. The biographer resists the temptation to sensationalise his subject, and offers a sympathetic account of his religious and historical thought. By contrast, Stefan Collini's review in the TLS (19 and 26 August 2011) is kinder to Butterfield's adultery than to his providentialism.

As Collini points out, Butterfield's reputation as an historian has been in sharp decline. His Christian readership has also shrunk, certainly when set aside the immense popularity of his contemporary, C.S. Lewis. Lewis's childlike sense of wonder enjoys a greater appeal than Butterfield's world-weary cynicism. Yet Bentley makes the case for revisiting Butterfield's thought, for taking it seriously, and he deserves a fair hearing.

Evangelicals and the Church of England in the 20th century

Slightly belated, I note the excellent conference that happened at Wycliffe Hall last month, organised by Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden. Whilst declaring an interest, in that I gave a paper myself, it would be fair to say that it was an unusually coherent conference, and which pointed the way towards signficant reinterpretation of the Keele conference and of the relationship between Anglican evangelicals in England and those in the wider Anglican Communion. It also served as a call to serious, nuts-and-bolts work on evangelicalism in the parishes: an investigation that has hardly begun, but for which Mark Smith gave some important signposts.
See also David Ceri Jones' rather fuller reflections on his own blog.

John Stott

I thought it might be useful to collect together a few of the various tributes to (the late) John Stott that have appeared so far. Very happy to add to this over time.

Useful media files, photos and reflections from the funeral service are available from the Langham Partnership site.

Notices in the religious press
Church Times and Christianity Today

In the broadsheet press and mainstream media
BBC website, Guardian and Independent. I guess the Times has had one too, but as one needs to pay for it, it isn't listed here. For a limited time, also listen to the BBC's Last Word obituary programme.

Personal reflections
From others connected with All Souls Langham Place: Mark Meynell and Richard Bewes. Jim Packer's sermon from a memorial service for Stott in Vancouver is available on YouTube, and a similar one from Peter Jensen here.

Although it won't remain forever, the activity on Twitter is also very interesting, under the hashtag #johnstott. Hopefully more permanent, and surely a new type of source for historians, will be the online remembrance book here.

The language of cloning

I note details of an interesting article by Eric Jensen of Warwick on the current debate about human cloning, at Academia.edu. It first appeared in 2005, but is now available online.

An instructive dispute

An instructive dispute concerning Jane Shaw's recent book Octavia, Daughter of God on the Panacea Society, and more specifically the review of it by Frances Stonor Saunders in the Guardian. Bartholomew's Notes seems to clear the matter up, perhaps more so than the author's own response on the Guardian site.

Whilst not being anywhere near as dramatic as some others of the comments on the article suggest, it does show the pitfalls of research being funded by the (heterdox) organisations, the history of which the work concerns.