IN SEARCH OF A “A MORE PERFECT SYMPATHY”: HARVARD'S PHILLIPS BROOKS HOUSE ASSOCIATION AND THE CHALLENGES OF STUDENT VOLUNTARISM

This article examines an early twentieth-century town-gown conflict to illuminate the class and religious tensions that complicated student voluntarism at Harvard University, where the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) formed in 1900 to unify the university's religious and service organizations. With PBHA, Harvard joined universities across the country in promoting student service and joining Progressive Era reform initiatives. The controversy following a student's talk at a Protestant Boston church—where the speaker criticized predominantly Catholic East Cambridge—shows why university representatives had trouble achieving their goals. In the decade following, PBHA struggled to articulate its mission, torn between its commitment to the Protestant Christian Association and a more secular approach, while striving to train effective volunteers and establish smooth relationships with professional social service organizations. This story of PBHA's early years exemplifies the challenges universities faced as they sought to put idealism into practice and transform students into social servants.

Problems with the Path of Phillips Brooks

ABSTRACTThis article takes the opportunity of Gillis Harp's recent biography of nineteenth-century American Episcopalian Phillips Brooks to engage Harp's theological situation of the Episcopal Church. Harp's revisionist historiographical argument, rejecting the Broad Church ‘myth of synthesis’ for a more agonized tale of trenchant party battles, is welcome for its perceptiveness and depth of analysis, not least as these historical difficulties remain at the centre of contemporary intra-Anglican and ecumenical conversations. Harp's commitment to a ‘Reformed’ and ‘evangelical’ Anglicanism, however, raises a series of questions – concerning the nature of orthodoxy and Christian doctrine, as well as ‘Protestant’ identity – that deserve greater investigation, and that historians and theologians would do well to pursue together.

Toward a Critical Historiography of the Episcopal Church

ABSTRACTHistorians of the Episcopal Church of the USA face the challenge of dealing with a tradition of in house ‘self-serving’ biographies and also of a Whiggish meta-narrative which privileged the Anglo Catholic reading of the history of ECUSA. This is similar to the challenge laid out by Diarmaid MacCulloch in relation to the English Reformation. This meta-narrative often read evangelicals out of the story. My book sought in part to correct this approach through a fresh analysis of Phillips Brooks' ministry and teaching. Within a broad tradition such as Anglicanism, argument about the past is part of the contemporary debate about identity in the tradition and of priorities in the present. That is very reasonable and a more candid engagement of the differences would serve everyone better than different perspectives passing each other like ships in the night.