This article, the first of a two-part empirical–theological study, examines the significance of empathy within Anglican ministry through the perspectives of Archdeacons in the Church of England. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty-five Archdeacons, a suffragan bishop and the National Executive Officer for Archdeacons, the study situates archidiaconal testimony within contemporary research on emotional intelligence, personality and Anglican pastoral theology. Part One establishes empathy as a decisive marker of ministerial flourishing and a recurrent deficit among struggling clergy, often with serious relational and ecclesial consequences. Archdeacons consistently identify empathic attunement, self-awareness and emotional flexibility as foundational to healthy pastoral leadership, while persistent dysfunction is frequently associated with relational blindness, rigidity or defensiveness. This article develops the empirical and conceptual foundations for Part Two, which explores whether empathy is formable, how it may be cultivated through formation and supervision and why it is theologically integral to the Anglican understanding of the cure of souls.

Building on the empirical findings of Part One, this article examines whether and how empathy may be developed, sustained and restored within Anglican ministry. Drawing again on archidiaconal testimony, it explores the formative ecology of ministry, including theological education, supervision, contemplative practice and diocesan culture. Archdeacons express a qualified but persistent hope that empathy is not fixed, but formable through self-awareness, reflective practice, prayer and skilled oversight, even while acknowledging limits where defensiveness or relational harm persists. The article brings these insights into dialogue with psychological research on emotional intelligence and theological accounts of compassion, kenosis and the cure of souls. It argues that empathy is neither a purely psychological trait nor a dispensable pastoral refinement, but a spiritually grounded, vocationally essential capacity. The article concludes by considering implications for clergy selection, formation, supervision and episcopal oversight within the Church of England.

On July 16, 1919, the Holy Office issued a decree declaring the teachings of the Theosophical Society incompatible with Catholic doctrine and forbidding the faithful from participating in its activities. Drawing on previously unexamined Vatican archival materials, this article reconstructs the five-year investigation that led to the decree and situates it within a longer institutional experience through which the Church confronted and regulated emerging spiritualities in an era of intense secularization. By analyzing the reports produced by different consultors, the article shows how Theosophy was interpreted through inherited classificatory frameworks shaped by earlier encounters with animal magnetism, Spiritualism, and occultism, and then refracted through the anti-modernist polemics of the early twentieth century. More broadly, the case sheds light on how the Vatican attempted to govern new forms of transnational religiosity that challenged established modes of ecclesiastical authority.

This article argues for a possible route by which Thomism might affirm the goodness of physical deformity as an aid to abstraction. Recent scholarship has shown how Aquinas can speak positively of bodily diversity as part of God’s providential order, without treating physical defect as a loss of dignity. I extend this line by asking whether Aquinas can also give physical deformity an intrinsic epistemic role. For Augustine, the cosmos is an intelligible whole ordered by eternal Forms in the Word, mediated by rationes seminales, so that even physical defects remain diminished likenesses of their exemplars and can serve the good of the whole. Aquinas rejects this strong Platonic imaging: he retains divine ideas as extrinsic measures determined by God’s will, treats cosmic unity as an ordo communis under providence, and identifies goodness with the actualisation of natural potency. I therefore locate physical deformity as a mixed case of David Oderberg’s notion of ‘goodness by approximation’. The paper states conditions under which a mixed case can clarify a ratio and sharpen the universal: intelligible species are entia rationis grounded in substantial similarity, and atypical cases can remove misleading accompaniments so that what belongs per se becomes more evident.

A growing consensus interprets the Pastoral phrasing μιᾶς γυναικὸς ἀνήρ (1 Tim 3.2, 12; Titus 1.6) and ἑνὸς ἀνδρὸς γυνή (1 Tim 5.8) in reference to church leaders and widows as ‘spousal fidelity’, despite this not being an intuitive approach to the phrases. This article contends that one-spouse traditions were widely enough known in the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds – especially once objections and misunderstandings are resolved – to render comprehensible a limitation to a single spouse. The univira traditions, for instance, apply to both women and men and include reference to faithfulness. The application of these traditions to widows was not a Christian innovation, lasted into the imperial era and influenced both Jews and early Christian authors. One-spouse traditions were also extant in the eastern part of the Empire. Some sectors of Judaism attest to such traditions. Jesus-sayings also prohibit remarriage. Lastly, the requirement for χήραι to marry in 1 Tim 5.11, 14 does not contradict this qualification for ‘real’ widows (5.9) since they were likely ‘virgin-widows’, admonished to marry for the first time, and the Pastoral emphasis is on identifying those with less resources, requiring more extensive assistance from the churches. The Pastorals’ insistence on a single marriage for officeholders and ‘real’ widows is yet another example of how Christ-believers are to be exemplars of, if not exceeding, the very best in Roman piety and marital values.

John William Colenso’s Commentary on Romans, written during his time as Bishop of Natal and published in 1861, remains neglected in the field of New Testament studies, as does Colenso’s work more generally, despite some notable recent attention. The commentary is, however, of considerable interest. It displays some significant similarities with the much later New Perspective on Paul, and offers an early example of a participationist reading of Paul, seen through the lens of Colenso’s inclusive and universalist theology. It also shares some of the problems of the New Perspective, particularly in terms of its critique of Judaism. The commentary is also significant and relevant to current debates about decolonisation, because of the ways in which the African context shaped Colenso’s reading of the letter and because of the powerful critique of (English) ethnic and (Christian) religious superiority that Colenso finds in Romans.

Sermons preached by clerics have been largely neglected by scholars as a resource for the study of the history of English ecclesiastical law since the Reformation. Needless to say, scholarship has focused on the substantive and procedural ecclesiastical law found in the ecclesiastical legislation of Parliament, the canons passed by the convocations, the case law of the spiritual and temporal courts and the treatises of the civilian commentators. However, some historians of early modern England have studied the sermons delivered at the Inns of Court; but these studies have little to say about their preachers’ portrayal of the ecclesiastical law and its jurisprudence.1 Nevertheless, as we shall demonstrate, in each century since the Reformation, clergy in their preaching commonly treated legal matters or else used legal materials, including ecclesiastical law. The eighteenth century is no exception – and Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761) is an excellent example, whose function included as Master of the Temple (1704–1753) preaching to the common lawyers of Inner and Middle Temple. What follows deals with his life and career, law in his sermons (including jurisprudential concepts common to both the temporal and the spiritual law), and his legal thought in wider context – all at a time when the law was an inescapable part of the religious landscape, the limits on toleration, the constraints on Roman Catholics, and the provision for occasional conformity.2

The article argues that the reference to the fig tree under which Jesus claims to have seen Nathanael (John 1.48) has not been satisfactorily discussed by previous critical interpreters. Instead, the tree should be understood against the backdrop of Second Temple and later Jewish and Christian exegetical discussions about what species the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil exactly was. After tracing these debates in ancient and early medieval sources, including iconography, the argument moves on to show the interpretative possibilities created by this proposal. The conclusion makes a case for understanding the Fourth Gospel as an inherently open work which invites the audience to actively participate in a variety of exegetical discourses, and whose author function builds its authority through polysemy.