In June the Institute was delighted to welcome as resident scholars Ephraim Radner and Annette Brownlee, a married couple, both Anglican priests and theologians.
Brownlee serves as Chaplain as well as Director of Field Education at Wycliffe College, an Anglican seminary in Toronto, Canada. She teaches in the Pastoral Theology Department with a particular interest in preaching. During her sabbatical at the Institute, her special area of research is the pastoral ministry of André Trocmé, the remarkable Reformed pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, whose congregation rescued 3500 Jews from the Nazis during World War II. While many have focused on this specific heroic work of Trocmé and his flock, Brownlee is investigating what practices Trocmé fostered in the community that made such heroic actions possible.
Radner serves as Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe. He is the author of a number of well-known and much-discussed books on ecclesiology, among them The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West and A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church. He has also dealt extensively with questions of scriptural interpretation, for example in Hope among the Fragments: The Broken Church and Its Engagement of Scripture and a commentary on Leviticus in Brazos Press’s Theological Commentary on the Bible series. In this vein, while at the Institute he will be complete a study of the figural method of scriptural interpretation, as well as beginning a new book on matters pertaining to theological anthropology.
The staff at the Institute has already benefited from their participation in its work and studies and looks forward to further stimulating conversation for their duration of their stay through the end of 2014.