This article revisits the linguistic periodization of the book of Jonah, focusing on E.B. Pusey’s 1860 commentary and its modern relevance. Pusey challenged claims that Jonah’s unusual lexicon and grammar required a post-exilic date, arguing instead for earlier, non-diachronic explanations such as dialect, foreign influence, and contextual usage. His nuanced treatment anticipated later methodological developments, especially the rule-governed approach of Avi Hurvitz, which identifies diagnostically late linguistic features through late distribution, classical opposition, and extrabiblical confirmation. Applying these criteria, the article surveys more than fifty features in Jonah deemed late by various scholars. Eleven emerge as strong indicators of lateness, while many others show partial or ambiguous significance, often explainable by genre, style-switching, or Phoenician/Aramaic influence. Taken cumulatively, the evidence suggests Jonah’s Hebrew belongs to a late stratum, most plausibly the sixth–fifth century BCE, within the Persian Period, though affinities with Rabbinic Hebrew complicate precise placement. While modern scholarship generally rejects Pusey’s pre-exilic dating, his sensitivity to methodological caution and non-diachronic variety remains instructive. Jonah thus stands as a linguistically peculiar text, chiefly Classical Biblical Hebrew, but with links to Late Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew, and Aramaic, that offers a valuable test case for theories of linguistic periodization.

Beginning with the public controversy over matters of conscience between William Gladstone and John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century, this article explores the significance of ‘conscience’ for moral theology in the Anglican tradition. Noting the genealogy of Newman’s thought and his debt to the eighteenth-century divine, Bishop Butler, the lecture also brings this tradition of thinking into conversation with more recent reflection about conscience in Roman Catholic moral theology. While ‘freedom of conscience’ is often emphasized in contemporary moral reflection, the lecture notes that ‘the obligations of conscience’ are also significant in the thought of Newman and others. The article considers the recent intervention on ‘Episcopacy and Conscience’ by the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England, before ending with a series of questions about the place of moral formation in seminary education in the Anglican Communion: how might Newman’s thinking about conscience animate our understanding of the spiritual and moral formation offered to ordinands?

Confronting and eliminating the injustice of the slave trade and slavery were crucial to the mission of the Church Missionary Society and its mid-19th-century ‘Upper Niger’ missionary agents in Nigeria. The native CMS missionaries on the Niger, led by Samuel Adjai Crowther, held a dual identity as subjects of the British Government (via the British colony of Sierra Leone) and as native members in their host communities. They were freed slaves or children of freed slaves who returned from Sierra Leone to serve in the natal regions from which they or their parents had been deported as slaves. They were the ones who purveyed the Christian ‘laws of God’. The influence of the British government, manifest, for example, in British consular oversight and in the frequent visits of imperial gunboats, also constituted them into subjects with the responsibility to espouse British law, ‘the laws of England’, and especially abolition and anti-slavery, in their Niger mission stations. But they were politically dependent on the support and approval of their politically autonomous hosts, whose structure of justice, ‘the laws of the land’, still accommodated slavery. This essay explores how these native CMS missionaries navigated among these conflictual juridical and moral spheres of responsibility.

What kinds of reports does the Church of England produce? Some are technical (e.g., annual reports, financial statements, etc.); others are more practical (e.g., safeguarding, ministry); whilst others are doctrinal or ecclesiological (e.g., ARCIC, a report from the Doctrine Commission, such as The Mystery of Salvation, 1995, etc.). Others are hybrid in character, taking issues and concerns (e.g., leadership, vocations, etc.) as pragmatic problems to be resolved and to which a theological gloss is added. This paper focuses on the nature of these hybrid-type reports as exemplars of consecrated pragmatism. In so doing, the ethos of the reports traces the trajectory of the Church of England as it continues to shed its theological capacities and dissolve in a culture of ecclesial managerialism, ontologised bureaucracy and frantic ecclesionomics. The paper offers ‘a report on knowledge’ and questions the nature and purpose of the writings that the Church of England publishes on a range of doctrinal and practical theological arenas.

Liturgies of Empire adopts a deliberately satirical, epistolary voice to examine the after-lives of Anglican imperialism as reconfigured in contemporary neocolonial activity. Some terms and turns of phrase assume an insider’s knowledge, and familiarity with socio-political definitions, the geographical regions and their specific religious registers and discourse would place the reader in a better position to appreciate the North/South epistemic critiques. Whilst the English narrator, recipient and institutional offices in the missive are entirely fictional, all events, statistics, and quotations are factual and have been verified against the sources cited. The memo casts an eye over three postcolonial Anglican dioceses as case studies to examine how the Anglican Realignment revives the spirit of empire through insistence on its monopoly of truth. It traces how conservative evangelical networks, under the banner of biblical warrant and “Global South” identity, reintensify imperial-era logics of propriety and paternalism. Attempting to supplant Canterbury’s more generous ecclesial disposition, these self-proclaimed guardians of truth are grounded in patriarchal authority, marked not by self-scrutiny but fixation on policing gender and sexuality. Theirs is an ecclesiology that cannot abide dissent, ambiguity, or difference, sanctifying conformity as faithfulness and exclusion as orthodoxy.

The Church of England has recently engaged again with issues of racism by setting up the Anti-Racism Taskforce in 2020, followed by the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice in 2021. Both groups stressed the lack of progress in tackling racism in the Church and the need to raise awareness of racial injustice at all levels. This paper reports on the measurement of racial awareness among 3,167 clergy and lay people who took part in the Church 2024 survey. Eight items in the survey were used to create the racial awareness scale. Results suggested a mixed picture with a majority awareness that racial inequality is an important issue that needs to be addressed, a majority rejection of the idea that there may be local or institutionally embedded racism and enthusiasm for diversifying leadership but not for taking specific actions relating to historic slavery. Multiple regression analysis showed racial awareness was shaped by a complex mixture of individual, contextual and religious factors.

For the first time in well over half a century, a Church of England bishop has been elected archbishop of an Australian metropolitan diocese with the election of Ric Thorpe, the Bishop of Islington in London, as Archbishop of Melbourne. It has come as a considerable surprise, not only for Melbourne but also for the Anglican Church of Australia. This paper will begin by dissecting the May election, contrasting it with previous Melbourne elections, before outlining the progressive character of Melbourne Diocese that exists no more. It will then discuss how the dramatic changes the election has revealed have come about, before turning to the impact on the broader Australian church.