The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement

The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement is an account of the origins and directions of the Broad Church movement from the beginning of the nineteenth century to about 1880. Author Tod Jones provides readers with a unique approach to the movement, demonstrating the development of the Broad Church movement by sketching the complex web connecting both important individuals and generations of great thinkers. The opinions and correspondence of key figures such as Thomas Arnold, Mathew Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alfred Tennyson are examined, as are broader questions about the Broad Church movement's roots in the Erasmian influence on England's church reformers. A work of immense depth, The Broad Church sketches the complex web of friendship and influence that made this movement such a significant cultural power and provides a comparative analysis of its diverse and brilliant principal thinkers.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction: What is the Broad Church? Chapter 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Chapter 3 Thomas Arnold & the Oxford Noetics Chapter 4 Cambridge Apostles and Prophets Chapter 5 Matthew Arnold & the Oxford Decade Chapter 6 Conclusion: An Evaluation

About the Author :
Tod E. Jones is a Lecturer on British Literature and Writing at the University of Maryland.

Review :
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. 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. 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. 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. . . . .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. 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. 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. 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.