John Webster’s Oxford inaugural begins with praise for his predecessor in the chair, Rowan Williams. If the fact of praise is routine in such a lecture, the content may have raised eyebrows. Williams’s intellectual work is praised above all for being ‘prayerful’ (italics original), which is not a standard part of the Oxford lexicon of…

Whenever John Webster published one of his essays, it seemed you could hear from certain sectors of the theological academy the sound of theologians dropping everything. They wanted—we wanted—to make sure our hands were free so we could take up and read. For about two decades these essays arrived as something less authoritative and less…

There’s been a real need for a biography on Kierkegaard that would be both accessible and enjoyable to a broad audience. In so many respects, Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard: A Single Life fills this lacuna. A Window in Denmark: Approaching Kierkegaard What Backhouse does so successfully is provide readers with a window into Kierkegaard’s life in…