In Asia and the Pacific, climate change is now a well-recognised risk to water security but responses to this risk are either under reported, or continue to be guided by the incremental or business as usual approaches. Water policy still tends to remain too narrow and fragmented, compared to the multi-sectoral and cross-scalar nature of risks to water security. What’s more, current water security debates tend to be framed in discipline specific or academic ways, failing to understand decis...

Essays to Commemorate the 850th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket (c. 1118-1170) | Foreword by Mgr Philip Whitmore Rector of the Venerable English College, Rome. Essays by Judith Champ, Peter Davidson, Eamon Duffy, Peter Leech, Peter Phillips, Carol M. Richardson, Nicholas Schofield. Edited by Maurice Whitehead | The murder on 29 December 1170 of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, sent shockwaves across the Christian world. The combination of his martyrdom, his canoniz...

The Church sets aside special days throughout the year to remember particular saints with feasts, memorials and solemnities. From the best-known reformers, founders and Doctors of the Church, to lesser-known saints and martyrs, each has been carefully chosen by the Church to be celebrated for his or her life and works. These texts help us to discover more about these holy men and women and why they are so important. It is an invaluable tool for daily prayer and a helpful introduction to th...

The story of Catholicism in England, told here through the broad sweep of the centuries, covers the periods of conversion, medieval consolidation, the crisis of the Reformation and then the Second Spring and its aftermath. This eBook offers readers a general framework into which they can slot whatever historical facts they already know. The often largely hidden history of the English Catholic Church and its intriguing personalities, cultural riches, controversies and stories of courage are...

The English reformers of the 1530s, with Thomas Cromwell at their head, continued to have a strong belief in kingly rule and authority, in contrast to their radical approach to the power of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. Resisting the king was tantamount to resisting God in their eyes, and even on a matter of conscience the will of the king should prevail. Yet just over 100 years later, Charles I was called the 'man of blood', and Oliver Cromwell famously declared...

An accessible biography of Henry VIII by one of the country's leading Tudor experts. The future Henry VIII was born on 29 June 1491, the second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. This talented, athletic and temperamental man might have proved something of a handful to his elder brother, Prince Arthur, the firstborn, had he survived to wear the crown. But Henry's life was changed forever when Arthur died in 1502 and the course of English history took a very unexpected turn.

This is far more than a dry hagiographical account of the lives of saints. This entertaining and authoritative dictionary breathes life into its subjects and is as browsable as it is informative. Critically acclaimed in its many editions the dictionary is now reissued into the rebranded best-selling Oxford Paperback Reference series.The entries are concise accounts of the lives cults and artistic associations of over 1400 saints from the famous to the obscure the rich to the poor and the acad...

Some of the saints of old we know little about and others we know much. But, we do know that the high esteem in which these men and women were held by their contemporaries and in which they have been held down to the present day, attests to the heroic quality of their saintliness. We can learn something from their lives.

A sumptuously written people’s history and a major retelling and reinterpretation of the story of the English ReformationCenturies on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. Peter Marshall’s sweeping new history—the first major overview for general readers in a generation—argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of “reform” in various competing guise...

The candid and compelling memoirs of the late Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who led the Catholic Church in England and Wales through the tempestuous first decade of the twenty-first century.When John Henry Newman spoke of his hopes for the renewal of the Church, he imagined not only sunshine and the blossoming of new life, but icy winds and torrential rain. His forecast of 'an English Spring' was to prove remarkably far-sighted.With affection and wry hum...

In the Middle Ages, it was thought that praying at the right shrine could save you from just about anything, from madness and famine to false imprisonment and even shipwreck.Kingdoms, cities, and even individual trades had patron saints that would protect them from misfortune and bring them wealth and prosperity, and their feast days were celebrated with public holidays and pageants. With saints believed to have the ear of God, veneration of figures such as St Thom...