Unfortunately, a series of unforeseen pressures on my time (some of them coming in the form of malevolent microorganisms) have forced me to abandon my blogging ambitions for this month; I still hope that next month will see a return to more writing here, but a number of academic writing commitments will get in the way.

However, I have not been idle, and I do have a number of publications that have just recently come out or are forthcoming.  Unfortunately, many of them you will need institutional journal subscriptions, a lot of money, or a good library to read, but someday, the open-access revolution may burst them out from the closely guarded paywall prisons in which they now reside.  The last and most exciting item, however, will be very widely and inexpensively available:

Fall 2013:

A review of Scott Kindred-Barnes, Richard Hooker’s Use of History in His Defense of Public Worship: His Anglican Critique of Calvin, Barrow, and the Puritans for the Journal of Anglican Studies.  Published online 9/27/13 here.

A review of A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology for the Anglican Theological Review 95.4 (Fall 2013): 734–36.  Some of you will recall that I reviewed this book at length here last spring.  But if you want the concise version, in which my caustic criticisms are thinly veiled in polite academese, the journal review may interest you.

Winter 2014:

A review of Peter Leithart’s Between Babel and Beast for Political Theology 15.1 (Jan. 2014): 10–12.  Again, I have blogged about this book in a number of places, and reviewed it for Reformation21 last summer, but this is the concise, academic version.

A book chapter, “Bancroft versus Penry: Conscience and Authority in Elizabethan Polemics,” appearing in the very exciting new volume edited by W.J. Torrance Kirby, Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520-1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).  And trust me, it really is a very exciting new volume, bringing together historians, theologians, English literature scholars, architectural history scholars, etc. to paint a picture of the enormous cultural impact of the open-air pulpit outside St. Paul’s Cathedral throughout the events that laid the foundation for modern Britain and Anglophone Protestantism.  My essay looks at how the complex dynamics of authority in church and state, conscience, and Christian liberty played out in a sermon by arch-conformist Richard Bancroft and the published critique by John Penry in 1589-90.

An article for a more popular audience in a new journal, The Statesman, entitled, “Three Things Conservatives Could Learn from Richard Hooker.” Forthcoming Feb. 2014.

Spring 2014:

An article, “More than a Swineherd: Hooker, Vermigli, and an Aristotelian Defence of the Royal Supremacy” that will be appearing in Reformation and Renaissance Review 15.1 (April 2014): 78–93.  This is going to be a spectacular special issue of RRR, guest-edited by my friend Jordan Ballor and focusing on the life and thought of the great Florentine reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli.  My friends Eric Parker and Simon Burton also have excellent articles in this issue—indeed, so excellent that I’m a little embarrassed for my little contribution to be appearing alongside theirs.  My article looks at how, in an argumentative strategy that turns many stereotypes on their heads, both Peter Martyr Vermigli and Richard Hooker deploy Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics in order to establish a Christian monarch’s responsibility to care for and advance the church in his realm.  This realization carries lots of exciting implications for our understanding of early modern Protestant political theology, and also strongly suggests something I want to work out more fully in later research—that Richard Hooker was deeply influenced by Vermigli’s work.

There are a few other articles and book reviews I’ve got coming down the pipeline, but I don’t have a very good idea of publication dates, so I’ll leave those out, and skip to the big news…

Spring 2015:

Richard Hooker: A Guide to His Life and Thought.  A new book in the Cascade Companions series, to be published by Cascade Books.  These are short (120-200 page) books aimed at a wide audience—students, pastors, church book studies, and more—that seek to introduce the work of important thinkers, texts, movements in the Christian tradition.  Cascade has just sent me the contract to write this, and I’m proposing to finish it within a year.

My provisional Table of Contents (with very pithy, very un-Hookerian chapter titles) at present is as follows

Pt. I: Richard Hooker

1. The Legend

2. The Man

3. The Book

Pt. II: Vision and Aims

4. Protestant

5. Polemicist

6. Philosopher

7. Pastor

Pt. III: Key Theological Issues

8. Salvation

9. Law

10. Scripture

11. Church

Pt. IV: Legacy

12. Richard Hooker: Contemporary

Stay tuned for more news, as this and other projects develop.