Recovering the classical Anglican intellectual tradition — Hooker, Baxter, Coleridge, Keble, and the great river of Christian thought that flows from Scripture to the present day.
Published at S Giles-in-Reading · Est. 12th century · Southampton Street, Reading RG1 2SB
The Recovery of Anglican Thought
Something important was lost in the twentieth century — the deep intellectual tradition that once made Anglicanism one of the most serious theological minds in Christendom.
At S Giles-in-Reading, we are trying to recover it. Through our partnership with the Coleridge Centre for Theological Philosophy, housed within this medieval parish church, we promote titles that restore to readable form the works of the thinkers who built that tradition.
These are not antiquarian projects. The engagement with the Trinity, with conscience, with the philosophy of nature found in Coleridge and Hooker speaks directly to the renewal of Christian intellectual life today.
"Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life. Not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a living Process. Try it."
— S. T. Coleridge, Aids to ReflectionPrayer, Scholarship, Hospitality
The Urban Abbey is the monastic vocation lived out in the heart of a modern city. S Giles-in-Reading maintains a daily Office of Mattins, Evensong, and Compline; feeds the poor twice weekly; and sustains a programme of theological education and publication.
When the western Roman Empire fell, Christian monasteries became the guardians of centuries of classical learning — copying, preserving, and commenting on the ancient texts that might otherwise have been lost. They did not merely remember these riches; they embodied them.
We live in an age not entirely dissimilar. Urban Abbey exists as part of that same vocation: not mere promotion, but the active commendation of a living tradition — books we know, trust, and recommend to anyone serious about the renewal of Christian intellectual life.
"Few model universes are more filled — one might say, more drenched — with Deity …"
— C. S. Lewis, on Richard Hooker, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 1954
Hooker's Lawes in Sixty-Three Days
Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie — A Reading Edition
Richard Hooker · Edited by David A. Harris & C. Peter Molloy · CCTP Publishing
Richard Hooker's Lawes stands at the heart of the Anglican tradition — one of the greatest works of theology ever written in English. Yet for most modern readers, it remains largely unread: its sentences are long, its arguments demanding, and its editions designed for specialists. The Hooker Project aims to change that.
Across sixty-three short daily readings, this edition guides the reader through the full scope of Hooker's vision: from the eternal law in the mind of God, through the natural and rational order of creation, to the life, worship, and authority of the Church. Not a simplification, but an invitation.
Coming July 2026 · CCTP Publishing
New Release
King Oswald's Heirs
A retelling of the Catechism of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer through the lives of Britain's saints — Alban, Oswald, Cuthbert, Bede, and many more. More than a primer of dry doctrine, this book reveals a spiritual inheritance richer and stranger than we think, rooted in the faith of the ancient and undivided Church.
Fr Thomas Plant, an Anglican priest with a Cambridge doctorate in theology, draws on the saints of the British Isles to show that the English Christian inheritance equals that of any church, East or West. For all English-speaking Christians number among King Oswald's heirs.
Galahad and the Grail
A visionary retelling of the Arthurian legend by the poet-theologian and former Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. Guite braids the Matter of Britain with Christian tradition and Celtic myth to reveal the Grail quest as a living spiritual inheritance — numinous, strange, and urgently contemporary.
"Full of numinous power, literary grace and Christian tradition deftly braided with folk tales." — Matthew D'Ancona, The New World
The Coleridge Editions
The first sustained attempt to present Coleridge's philosophical theology to a readership beyond specialist scholarship. Five volumes tracing the complete arc of his thought — from the postulate of the Will through the deduction of the Trinity to a speculative philosophy of nature without parallel in English.
Essential Theological Coleridge
The first comprehensive anthology of Coleridge's philosophical theology, gathering the central arguments of the Opus Maximum, the Biographia Literaria, the Aids to Reflection, the Statesman's Manual, and the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit into a single continuous arc. Introduced by Owen Barfield's classic essay on how Coleridge must be read: not comparatively, not biographically, but on his own speculative terms.
Opus Maximum, or Logosophia
Coleridge's unfinished masterwork — arguably the most ambitious work of speculative theology in the English language. From the single postulate of the Will, it sets out to demonstrate the necessity of the Trinity, the origin of evil, and the possibility of redemption, presented here for the first time as a continuous, readable argument.
The Birth of the World
Coleridge's speculative cosmogony presented as a self-standing work. Here the Trinitarian philosophy enters nature itself: the divine Word goes forth in the Spirit, and the result is the visible universe, generated not by mechanism but by the law of polarity. The most extraordinary and least-known section of the Opus Maximum, made readable for the first time.
The Theory of Life
Coleridge's most concentrated work of natural philosophy — his single sustained attempt to define life and trace its law through the whole ascending scale of nature, from the primordial homogeneous drop to man as microcosm. The essay demolishes every existing definition of life before offering its own: "the principle of unity in multeity, as far as the unity is produced from within."
The Ground of Faith
The philosophical foundation of the Opus Maximum presented as a single continuous argument. What must you bring to Christianity before you can examine it? Coleridge's answer moves from the common Creed through the problem of circular reasoning, to the one postulate that cannot be denied without absurdity: the existence of a responsible Will.
The Wider Tradition
Alongside the Coleridge and Hooker editions, we recommend titles in the participatory tradition from Plato through Aquinas to the twentieth century, and neglected works of Christian theological imagination restored to print by the Coleridge Centre.
Why Coleridge Was Right About Everything
The Opus Maximum contains a Trinitarian cosmogony of extraordinary power — a derivation of the forces of nature from the divine life, passing through the catastrophe of the Apostatic will. It is the answer to the question Schelling left open in three failed drafts of the Weltalter, and it meets Žižek's void ontology on its own Schellingian ground.
The Descent of the Dove
A history of the Church like no other — told not through councils and controversies but through the action of the Holy Spirit in human lives, from Pentecost to the twentieth century. One of the most extraordinary and least conventional works of theology in the English language, restored to print.
The Glass of Vision
Farrer addresses the question Coleridge spent his life pursuing: how does the divine mind communicate with the human? His answer — that supernatural revelation operates through living images and that the inspired imagination is the organ by which we receive it — is the most rigorous philosophical defence of the Primary Imagination in the English tradition.
Participation in the Divine
The concept of participation in a transcendent domain of existence is central to the Platonic and the Judaeo-Christian traditions — it is how thinkers throughout history have justified existence itself, explaining temporal being in relation to God. Yet in the wake of secularisation and disenchantment, this once-ubiquitous notion has fallen into neglect.
This landmark Cambridge volume traces that concept from antiquity to the modern era, bringing together an international team of leading scholars — including Torrance Kirby — and challenging the modern university's sharp division between philosophy and theology. Essential reading for anyone serious about the participatory tradition.
Angelico's New Editions of Mascall
The American publisher Angelico Press has begun restoring the works of E. L. Mascall — the Church of England's leading Thomist — to handsome new editions, several carrying new forewords by leading theologians. We warmly commend them.
He Who Is
Mascall's classic of natural theology, reading Aquinas's Five Ways as one demonstration of the creature's dependence on a self-existent God.
Existence and Analogy
The sequel to He Who Is, developing the doctrines of analogy and existence as the foundations of natural theology.
Via Media
Orthodoxy as the holding-together of apparent opposites across Creation, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Grace.
The Importance of Being Human
The Christian doctrine of man — the human person as evolved body and immortal soul, formed by the deliberate act of a personal God.
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Grace and Glory
A bracing call to remember our eternal destiny — grace as the very beginning of glory, ordered toward heaven.
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The Christian Universe
A spirited defence of the Christian vision of a meaningful cosmos against modern unbelief and indifference.
View →The Library of Early English Reformed Theology
The Davenant Institute is recovering the seminal but neglected divines of the English Reformation — Hooker, Jewel, Traherne, and more — in scholarly yet readable editions, several rendered into modern English for the first time. Read from the Reformed side of the Anglican house, they make a bracing companion to our own shelf.
The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
Hooker's masterwork made readable — Scripture, reason, tradition, and authority in the life of the Church.
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The Word Made Flesh for Us
The great Book V of the Laws — the person of Christ, our union with him, and the sacraments.
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An Apology of the Church of England
The Bishop of Salisbury's classic defence of the English Church's continuity with the ancient Church.
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The Shining Human Creature
Traherne's poetic ethics, modernized — theology, anthropology, and virtue woven into devotion.
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A Treatise on Christian Moderation
Bishop Hall's plea for the virtue of moderation in a fracturing age, argued from history and Scripture.
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James Ussher & a Reformed Episcopal Church
The Archbishop of Armagh's sermons and treatises on the Church — its unity, purity, and government.
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Theophanizing Love
We are very excited about this forthcoming book from one of the most important theologians working in the participatory tradition today. Fr Boersma's new work centres on Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, exploring a panentheist metaphysic that holds divine transcendence and immanence together — the same deep current that runs through the whole Urban Abbey Books tradition.
The cover is taken from Hildegard of Bingen's extraordinary vision of creation in Scivias — fitting for a book about the God who is at once utterly beyond and intimately within all things. No publication date yet — watch this space.
Follow Fr Boersma at hansboersma.org
The Barfield Sessions
Owen Barfield spent fifty years working out what Coleridge thought. His grandson has spent twenty trying to pass it on. Over five days of conversation, three people discover why these ideas resist transmission, and what it costs to receive them.
A work of philosophical fiction commissioned by the Centre to make Owen Barfield's notoriously difficult What Coleridge Thought accessible to a new generation — set over five days in a Yorkshire recording studio, as lived discovery rather than academic exposition.
Pre-readers welcome — contact us if you wish to read the manuscript.