Kirjahaku

In spite of the differing, and often conflicting interpretations, there have been several constants – beliefs about Hooker and his work – that have remained virtually unchallenged throughout the centuries. Richard Hooker, Beyond Certainty examines and calls into question three of these constants. The first to be challenged is the fundamental belief that Hooker is attached securely to the English Church and that their identities are so interwoven that to speak of one is to speak of the other. The second is that Hooker's prose – his unique writing style and powerful rhetoric – can be ignored in the process of assessing his theology. The third is the widely-held belief that, as the 'champion of reason', Hooker's faith is essentially rational and that God is perceived and experienced primarily through the intellect. Challenging the truth of each of these statements leads to an uncertainty about Hooker which, rather than negating scholarship, allows research to be liberated from the dominance of categorisation. Such a change, it is suggested, would acknowledge that Hooker's theology transcends Anglican studies and allows his radical thinking to reach a wider audience.

In spite of the differing, and often conflicting interpretations, there have been several constants – beliefs about Hooker and his work – that have remained virtually unchallenged throughout the centuries. Richard Hooker, Beyond Certainty examines and calls into question three of these constants. The first to be challenged is the fundamental belief that Hooker is attached securely to the English Church and that their identities are so interwoven that to speak of one is to speak of the other. The second is that Hooker's prose – his unique writing style and powerful rhetoric – can be ignored in the process of assessing his theology. The third is the widely-held belief that, as the 'champion of reason', Hooker's faith is essentially rational and that God is perceived and experienced primarily through the intellect. Challenging the truth of each of these statements leads to an uncertainty about Hooker which, rather than negating scholarship, allows research to be liberated from the dominance of categorisation. Such a change, it is suggested, would acknowledge that Hooker's theology transcends Anglican studies and allows his radical thinking to reach a wider audience.

1936: After twelve-year-old Graeme Moodie recovers from polio, he's left with a pronounced limp. Unable to handle a 'normal' boarding school with its beatings and bullying, he goes to Maiden Erlegh School for Boys which, Moodie later claimed, changed his life. The story is largely true. Whispered by locals to take all sorts of misfits and oddballs, the school is the brainchild of Captain TS Waterlow Fox, an ex-Army captain who rules with an iron fist in a velvet glove. 'We're all different, we're all the same,' is his message. Graeme's intelligence shines. His roommates are Paul Caspari, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and Charlie Marshall, a stutterer, badly damaged by his parents' nasty divorce. Graeme feels at home, and for the first time in years, happy. Now if only he could find a girlfriend - that would be heaven. But by 1939, as storm clouds of war grow ever closer, a German student joins the Nazi party, which threatens to shatter Maiden Erlegh's bubble of sanity.