Anglican Identities

Is there an "Anglican identity"? Or is living with the tension between different temperaments and histories itself at the heart of the genius of Anglicanism?

Anglican Identities draws together studies and profiles by Rowan Williams that sympathetically explore approaches to scripture, tradition, and authority that are very different―yet at the same time distinctively Anglican. William Tyndale, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, B. F. Westcott, Michael Ramsey, and John A. T. Robinson are among the writers and theologians whose work Archbishop Williams explores. Williams resists easy characterizations and makes surprising connections between apparently opposing positions. In his study of the Victorian biblical scholar B. F. Westcott, for example, he suggests that “we might begin to identify a style of Anglican liberalism that is rather different from what liberalism is commonly supposed to be.”

Significantly, the name that recurs most often in these essays is that of Richard Hooker: “tantalizingly hard to pigeonhole―like the Anglican tradition as a whole.” Anglican Identities conveys the richness of the Anglican mosaic without ducking the difficult question of how far diversity can stretch before a common tradition begins to fragment.