Acknowledgments
I would not have had the opportunity to write this book – a process I have enjoyed immensely and from which I have learned even more – if the Rev. Dr. Christopher Craig Brittain had not recommended me as a possible author for what was, at that time, an extended journal article on the Anglican theological tradition that Brill was seeking to commission. I am truly grateful to Chris for giving them my name. I hope this book, resulting from Brill’s decision to expand the scope of the original idea, does him proud. Any argument the reader has with what appears here, however, should be charged to my account, of course, not to his.
When the Rev. Dr. Ellen K. Wondra retired from teaching and moved from Chicago back to her old stomping grounds out here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had the immense good fortune of receiving from her library a huge trove of books on Anglicanism and Anglican theology that were invaluable to me as I worked on this project. I would have been grateful to her for such a gift under any circumstances, but I am especially so given the pandemic-induced library closures I experienced while writing this. The books she gave me were a particular godsend at that time.
My deep thanks to the Very Rev. Dr. W. Mark Richardson, Dean and President, and the Rev. Dr. Ruth A. Meyers, Dean of Academic Affairs, at Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP), and to CDSP’s governing board at Trinity Church Wall Street for granting me the Fall 2020 sabbatical leave I used to conduct research and write the bulk of the manuscript. Thanks, too, to the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge and Dr. Stephan Quarles for covering my regular-term courses at CDSP during that time. Also, I am deeply grateful for the chance to share an early version of the introduction, Part 1, and part of Part 2 of the book with my faculty colleagues at CDSP and for their incredibly helpful comments and feedback on that section of the manuscript.
Because I wrote this book during 2020 and 2021, and that time was, to the say the least, a challenging one in light of the global pandemic and of the massive political upheaval in the United States, I must thank Dr. Tessel Jonquière, my editor at Brill, for her patience when I was delayed in writing the manuscript. I am so grateful for the allowances Tessel made for simple human finitude in the form of deadline extensions. I think the extra time that she and Dr. Stephan van Erp, the Editor-in-Chief of the Research Perspectives in Theology series, gave me has made the end result much stronger. My profound thanks, too, to Dr. David Grummett of the University of Edinburgh, who shepherded the manuscript through peer review and who graciously and expeditiously fielded all of my questions.
Finally, I wish to thank my students at CDSP – past and present – who have worked with me, but particularly those who have taken my “Contemporary Anglican Theologians” course in one of its various iterations. They have heard and provided feedback on several of the core arguments I make in this text and I am immensely grateful to them for that. This book is dedicated to them.