I am currently sitting in a very empty St Benet's Hall in Oxford, the small permanent private hall of Oxford University from which I took my degree.
The reason I am in St Benet's is because a monk friend of mine is over from St Louis Abbey, in Missouri, and he is staying at St Benet's for a few days. The students are all gone, the staff have all gone, it's just me, Fr Bede, with the furniture slightly re-ordered since I was last here (no I'm not talking about the chapel). As Fr Bede has gone to honour a prior supper engagement at Lincoln College (beautiful first quad, great bar), and I have nowhere to go until the friend I am staying with returns from London I am skulking in the St Benet's library (something I did rarely as an undergraduate) admiring the sheer number of T&T Clark books on the shevles. ICCs, LHBOTS, LNTS, lots of Karl Barth, more importantly lots of Cardinal von Balthasar.
In recent years the fellows of St Benet's have found their way onto the T&T Clark list. Firstly, in Jennifer
Cooper's new monograph on Schillebeeckx, praised by Philip Kennedy (who wrote the volume on Schillebeeckx for our old OCT series several hundred years ago) as 'genuinely fascinating to read and a mine of information', secondly in a forthcoming book by Fr Bernard Green Christianity in Rome in the First Three Centuries which is in production now and looks set to fill a real gap in the market, it is beautifully written too. Finally, in a book which I signed up relatively recently by Dom Henry Wansbrough (who had published with us before in years gone by) - former Master of St Benet's - The Use and Abuse of the Bible a trade book which takes the reader through the different ways in which people have responded to the bible across the centuries. Of course, Fr Henry has also contributed to a very exciting new book on the infancy narratives for us New Perspectives on the Nativity. This book examines the infancy narratives from a variety of different angles, and is all the more valuable because since Raymond Brown there just hasn't been that much on them. It's great to be publishing this in PB from the outset.
And of course, Basil Hume was an undergraduate a St Benet's, and our recent book on him edited by William Charles features wonderful contributions from Abbot Patrick Barry, who until recently has been resident at St Louis.
But I arrived in Oxford with only one book which I wanted to discuss with and lend to Fr Bede, which I finished reading this morning, Eamonn Duffy's new book on the reign of Mary Tudor Fires of Faith (published by Yale - don't say we only write about our own books!). Of course I found that Fr Bede already had it. Hours later (on the way to buy cake in the Covered Market) we walked past the spot where Cranmer was burned as a heretic. The jury is still out for me on Cranmer - genius of the reformation with a real and unique sacramental theology as Gordon Jeanes argues in Signs of God's Promise or opportunistic and inconsistent Zwinglian. Perhaps I should let Thomas examine that one!
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