Richard Hooker - Philip Bruce Secor

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.;This biography, researched over many years yet designed to be accessible to the general interested reader, presents Hooker 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.