This book explores the culture of conformity to the Church of England and its liturgy in the period after the Reformation and before the outbreak of the Civil War. It provides a necessary corrective to our view of religion in that period through a serious exploration of the laypeople who conformed, out of conviction, to the Book of Common Prayer. These "prayer book Protestants" formed a significant part of the spectrum of society in Tudor and Stuart England, yet until now they have remained an almost completely uninvestigated group.

The lives of Christian churches are shaped by doctrinal theology. That is, they are shaped by practices in which ideas about God and God's ways with the world are developed, discussed and deployed. This book explores those practices, and asks why they matter for communities seeking to follow Jesus. Taking the example of the Church of England, this book highlights the embodied, affective and located reality of all doctrinal practices - and the biases and exclusions that mar them. It argues that doctrinal theology can in principle help the church know God better, even though doctrinal theologians do not know God better than their fellow believers. It claims that it can help the church to hear in Scripture challenges to its life, including to its doctrinal theology. It suggests that doctrinal disagreement is inevitable, but that a better quality of doctrinal disagreement is possible. And, finally, it argues that, by encouraging attention to voices that have previously been ignored, doctrinal theology can foster the ongoing discovery of God's surprising work.

What do the novelists Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte M. Yonge, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy L. Sayers, Barbara Pym, Iris Murdoch and P.D. James all have in common? These women, and others, were inspired to write fiction through their relationship with the Church of England. This field-defining collection of essays explores Anglicanism through their fiction and their fiction through their Anglicanism. These essays, by a set of distinguished contributors, cover a range of literary genres, from life-writing and whodunnits through social comedy, children's books and supernatural fiction. Spanning writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, they testify both to the developments in Anglicanism over the past two centuries and the changing roles of women within the Church of England and wider society.

Matt Woodcock returns with this sequel to the bestselling 'Becoming Reverend'. Follow Matt's journey as he starts work at one of Hull's oldest, biggest and emptiest churches. It's a shadow of its former self, with a small congregation and huge bills to pay. Adding the entrepreneurial (and somewhat excitable) Matt to their clergy line-up is the last throw of the dice for this 700-year-old institution. But is Matt ready for such a tough first assignment? Are his new flock - or his new colleagues - ready for the whirlwind that's about to descend? And can Matt realize his vision of a thriving church without wrecking his home life in the process? As this real-life diary reveals, Matt's life being Reverend can be every bit as fraught, funny and fascinating as it was becoming one.