Richard Hooker

"Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is the premier theologian of the Church of England, famed for his prophetic apologia of what would later be called "Anglicanism" in his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. To the present day, his advocacy of a tolerant, inclusive, moderate, even pragmatic middle way between fundamentalist Protestantism and the more rigid expressions of Roman Catholicism is a hallmark of Anglican/Episcopal Churches." "Hooker's insistence that human reason as well as the customary practices and expressed wisdom of the Church are important sources for knowing God's will remains as a corrective to the biblical literalism that characterizes much of Protestantism." "For all of his importance, little has ever been known about Hooker's life. Izaak Walton's short seventeenth-century hagiography spawned an enduring (but largely inaccurate) tradition that Hooker was a frail, dove-like, holy man - even saintly - who was unhappily married but "judicious" in all of his words and deeds - altogether an uninteresting and forgettable icon of moral rectitude." "With the appearance of Dr. Secor's landmark biography, thoroughly researched over many years yet written in a style accessible to the general interested reader, Hooker emerges at last (on the eve of the fourth centenary of his death) into the light of history as a full-blooded Elizabethan figure endowed with all of the very human strengths and weaknesses of the other leaders in that dynamic, formative age."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Richard Hooker is arguably the closest counterpart in the English Reformation to Luther and Calvin. Here, the story of Hooker's life is woven into a narrative that incorporates the well-known events and famous persons of the Elizabethan era.
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This long-neglected figure is arguably the closest counterpart in the English Reformation to Luther and Calvin. This new biography is the culmination of fifteen years of intensive research into Hooker's life and thought.>
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