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Has Ecclesiastical History Lost the Plot?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sarah Foot
Sarah Foot*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
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Extract

The Ecclesiastical History Society’s fiftieth anniversary conference provides an opportunity both to celebrate the achievements of the society and to reflect on the current state of the discipline. In asking whether church historians have lost the plot, I do not mean to question colleagues’ reason and sanity, but to wonder whether those of us who work in this field might have forgotten some of the objectives and principles that once distinguished our endeavour. Has ecclesiastical history lost its sense of purpose, its place at the heart of historical enterprise, to the extent that it has become not just marginalized and peripheral, but essentially irrelevant both to academic study and wider society?

Type
Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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Footnotes

*

I gave an earlier version of this essay as my inaugural lecture in Oxford on 18 May 2011: ‘Thinking with Christians: Doing Ecclesiastical History in a Secular Age’.

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