Stewart Headlam's Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, the Masses, and the Music Hall (Studies in Anglican History)

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful introduction to the Evolving Political Left
Review: Orens' Stewart Headlam's Radical Anglicanism is not only a fascinating, and long overdue, intellectual biography of Stweart Headlam, the Anglican cleric who worked so diligently to christianize Socialism, but also a very well-told account of the evolving debate on the part of the politiical left in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. A debate which in time was to have an impact on the development of the Social Gopsel in the United States.

Orens is a very capable storyteller, and the reader soon finds himself in the world and thoughts of Headlam, G.B. Shaw and S. Webb. Through their own words the reader is taken along as they strive, and bicker, to find the way to build the New Jerusalem in Britian. along the way, the reader comes to repsect Headlam for the stregnth of his convictions and the depths of hit faith.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the story of evolving political thought in the nineteenth century, the foundations of a christianized political left, or just a great biography of one of the world's more interesting characters.