This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.

Some scholars, faced with the apparent conflict between the Church of England's teaching on marriage and the idea of equal marriage embraced by the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, have focused on the implications of that Act for the constitutional relationship between Church, State and nation. More frequently, noting the position of the Church of England under that Act, academics have critiqued the legislation as an exercise in balancing competing human rights. This article by contrast, leaving behind a tendency to treat religion as a monolithic ‘other’, and leaving behind the neat binaries of rights-based analyses, interrogates the internal agonies of the Church of England as it has striven to negotiate an institutional response to the secular legalisation of same-sex marriage. It explores the struggles of the Church to do so in a manner which holds in balance a wide array of doctrinal positions and the demands of mission, pastoral care and the continued apostolic identity of the Church of England.

The Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man is an important member of the Legislative Council, the second chamber of the Manx Tynwald. The shape of Tynwald has changed considerably since the mid-nineteenth century, and there have been frequent reviews of the place of ecclesiastical officers in it. The most recent debates illuminate this form of religious representation, but in particular show the importance of ecclesiastical structures – and the contingent status of the Diocese of Sodor and Man – in the lord bishop retaining a vote, as well as a voice, in the principal organ of governance in the Isle of Man. This article argues that a more critical approach is needed in weighing the ecclesiastical structure argument against other constitutional arguments around the constitutional position of the lord bishop.

Members of the Church of England are part of an ordered Church with a given liturgy. That order is deeply embedded in our story and today all clergy and lay ministers function and carry out their ministries on the authorisation of the bishop of the diocese. The Church of England is an institution which has its rules, laws and codes of conduct. Because we have no doctrinal formulations of our own, the liturgy in the Church of England expresses much of our theology. While there have been many changes in liturgy, a given liturgy, or a liturgical structure within which certain texts are prescribed, is part of how we are.

On 22 January 2019, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe agreed the text of Resolution 2253: Sharia, the Cairo Declaration and the European Convention on Human Rights. The Resolution begins – on an uncontroversial note – by reiterating ‘the obligation on member States to protect the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion as enshrined in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights … which represents one of the foundations of a democratic society’. It then goes on, however, to recall that the Assembly ‘has on several occasions underlined its support for the principle of the separation of State and religion, as one of the pillars of a democratic society’. This statement is not entirely non-contentious: it ignores the situation in several Member States of the Council of Europe and is based more on notions of laÿcitÕ than on the observable facts in countries such as England, Denmark, Finland and Norway that have state Churches. Unfortunately, this simplification and confusion set the tone for what is to follow.

HM Land Registry has published an updated Practice Guide on the property aspects of converting a charitable trust into a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (‘CIO’). Church of England parishes cannot convert themselves into CIOs, but congregations in some smaller denominations have either done so already or are contemplating conversion.

This report covers the groups of sessions held in February 2018 and July 2018. Both meetings again saw significant amounts of legislative business, with a number of items giving effect to proposals emerging from the simplification strand of the Archbishops’ Council's ‘Renewal and Reform’ programme or directed in other respects at simplifying or streamlining the Church's substantial body of statute law. Indeed, such has been the level of legislative activity over the last two years that in the course of 2018 no fewer than nine Measures have been enacted – the highest number in a single year since the Church acquired the ability to make Measures having the force and effect of an Act of Parliament under the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919.