Jane Shaw is now principal of an Oxford college, so the university in which she worked before a sojourn in the USA as professor at Stanford University and dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. In this book she studies four figures from the first half of the twentieth century, all from the Church of England, but turns some of what she learns intentionally to the Episcopal Church as well as the Church of England. The book is a version of her Sarum Lectures at Salisbury Cathedral in 2017, with its chapters focusing in turn on Evelyn Underhill, Reginald Somerset Ward, Percy Dearmer, and Rose Macauley: spiritual directors, priests, and novelists, in different combinations. The chapter on Macauley also features Society of St John (SSJE) priest Hamilton Johnson, and Maude Royden turns up in the chapter on Dearmer. Underhill especially continues to generate some attention, but all of the major figures in this book deserve to be remembered, as Shaw shows. Shaw’s outline of the life and work of each of her subjects is paired to major themes, so Underhill: ‘seeking’ and simplicity, Ward: ‘prayer’ and rule of life, Dearmer: ‘beauty’ in relation to justice, Macauley: ‘second chances’ and spiritual heritage. (There’s a nice distillation at pp. 116-17.) There is plenty that ‘resonates’ (p. 2) reading about these figures now.

All of this would be interesting enough in itself, as Shaw draws out how each subject yields ideas about ‘cultivating a relationship with God’ (p. 2). But this book is more gripping because of how Shaw frames her explorations, starting with her opening quote: ‘Church going has declined steadily and rapidly … people no longer attend what they do not like’, which turn out to be the words of Dearmer, one hundred years ago (in 1919). Shaw’s attention to her subjects then draws out their recognition of widespread ‘aversion to institutionalism’ (p. 2) and such like in their own times, as well as the considerable hesitations of the four themselves to be involved in church. Shaw points out that while all four are now known for their Anglicanism, in each case (though different in each case) this was a development, and they each came to faith, or to an Anglican expression of it, late, only after quite considerable struggle.

In a final chapter, ‘spirituality and the church today’, Shaw makes proposals that are more contentious. She may be right that her studies conspire to challenge the widespread view that decline of engagement with institutional religion began in the 1960s. And she gives nuance to the point that it has been public religious practice that has declined. For her four subjects are examples of a ‘search for spirituality’ that has persisted even when institutions are unappealing. So: ‘To absent oneself from church is not to be without a spiritual thirst or longing for a structure in which to ask ultimate questions’ (pp. 102-103), and people have continued to find portals to transcendence in individual prayer, retreats, reading in mysticism/spirituality, and the arts. Distilling some of what she thinks her four subjects might offer to the churches’ struggles to engage at the present time on either side of the North Atlantic, Shaw highlights beauty and justice as qualities the churches can uphold and invite. Her examples, however, are limited: St James, West Hampstead, London – with post office, cafe and stationery shop combined with worship space; and St Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco – a new build with echoes of a Shinto shrine, altar in the centre of a dancefloor and communal processions with Ethiopian umbrellas as part of its splendid liturgical style. She also points to cathedrals as growth points. It must be noted (though not by Shaw) that these are places with considerable resources (of people and money for starters) beyond many others. So while her principles may stand, and her examples all be marvellous – why not, for example, the Ethiopian umbrellas? – sharp questions might arise about applicability to elsewheres, depending on the context from which one reads. This is to say that some readers more than others will have to do their own work with this chapter – its ‘resonance’ is likely to be quite variable. Whatever one makes of the final chapter, Jane Shaw is, however, surely quite right to insist that one way or another people now tend to need ‘pathways to the heritage’ of the Christian tradition (p. 105), and her four lively subjects and her deft commendation of them in their relation to Anglican expressions of that Christian tradition involves very much to enjoy.