This paper seeks to explore the ‘hermeneutical gaps’ identified in a recent and ongoing investigation across the Anglican Communion into the way the Bible is read within worldwide Anglicanism. This investigation is of contemporary importance to the Anglican Communion as the Project's findings were recently presented to the 15th Anglican Consultative Council in October 2012. The ‘hermeneutical gaps’ which have been identified shed important insights into the strained fellowship which currently seems characteristic of the Communion. The approach of this paper is to evaluate whether these ‘gaps’ are symptomatic of an inevitable fracturing within the Communion or whether points of apparent disconnect in the use of the Bible are able to be bridged, held together or reconciled for the benefit of Anglicanism's common life.

The present study employs Jungian psychological type theory to examine the profile of 236 Readers serving in the Church of England (108 males and 128 females) alongside previously published data providing the psychological type profile of clergy serving within the Church of England (626 men and 237 women). The analysis was interpreted to test two competing accounts of Reader ministry: that Reader ministry expresses similar qualities to those reflected in ordained ministry, and that Reader ministry represents a pioneer ministry on the boundaries of the church. Overall the findings demonstrate significant psychological similarities between those exercising Reader ministry and those exercising ordained ministry, suggesting that, in the current generation, Readers tend to present themselves as clones of the clergy rather than as distinctive voices equipped for pioneer ministry or for fresh expressions of church.

In response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

To explicate the Good Samaritan parable, this paper employs Rowan Williams’ interpretations of the parabolic imagination as explored in On Christian Theology (2000) and in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping (1980). Williams identifies reading strategies that open possibilities for reading parables through the lens of contemporary texts. Robinson's novel Housekeeping with its unconventional cast of unconnected women provides a contemporary way to explore the parable's opening question. Both Williams and Robinson, in their respective thoughts about ‘housekeeping’ as mutuality, discover that privileging established answers, conventional families and coded traditions interrogates the question ‘who is my neighbor?’ Both the theologian and the novelist explore behaviors that open the boundaries of family and traditions so that the elusive/allusive answer to the parable's question is found in unexpected haunting places with unfamiliar transients and on an ancient public road with one who has no name and voice.