James Crockford 
Faith Beyond Fear 
Sermons from Newman’s Pulpit

John Henry Newman’s pulpit at St Mary’s, Oxford, was a powerhouse of religious innovation and reinvigoration in English religion through the 1830s and 1840s. This towering neogothic structure gave platform to preachers who conveyed a new imagination for the life of faith, and whose vision of belief provoked personal and societal awakenings. Today, we are in need once again of reimagining the challenges of our world, and the meaning of Christian faith, in ways that cut through the religious jumble, and speak to the fears and failings of our time. This volume collects sermons by one of that pulpit’s most recent preachers.
Anxiety, pain, hope, and judgement are key themes. There are liturgical themes and feasts taken in fresh directions, and always an insistence on deconstructing easy answers and pious lingo. These are exercises in reading Scripture, and reading our lives, in ways that speak beyond the borders of religious identity and certainty. These sermons draw us deeper into the reality of our own predicaments and fears, to discover a presence and power that might surprise and disrupt us, and help us to reimagine faith in the modern world.

关于作者

James Crockford is based in Cambridge, UK, where he is Dean of Chapel, Tutor and Fellow at Jesus College in the University of Cambridge. He studied Music at the University of Nottingham, and after working in church community projects and training in counselling, he came to Cambridge to read Theology at Trinity Hall, whilst training for ordination at Ridley Hall.James served in parish ministry on the edge of south-east London, before moving to be Associate Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford and Honorary Chaplain at Magdalen College, Oxford.