Apologia

<p>Aidan Nichols has been contributing to theological literature since the beginning of the 1980s. </p><p> </p><p>Now in his seventy-fifth year he looks back not only at his writings but at the three-quarters of a century of life from which they came. He explains how despite a nominally Anglican background his early sense of the transcendent was really of God in nature. Only through an experience in the Russian church in Geneva did he become a confessing Christian. </p><p> </p><p>Back home where he was left a teenage orphan he moved from Anglo-Catholicism into the Roman Catholic Church. After reading Modern History at Oxford that led by a natural progression to becoming a Religious and a priest. In this book Nichols describes the wide variety of situations in which he has lived in Scotland Norway Rome France Ethiopia and Jamaica as well as England and the United States. </p><p> </p><p>Over the years drawing on not only Catholic but also Orthodox and Anglican sources he has produced a small library of books touching on many areas of theology and culture while also seeking at different times to bind them together into a coherent unity inspired by principally two great giants: Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar. </p><p> </p><p>For Aidan Nichols the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI were a halcyon time. Things have been more difficult under the successor to these popes. He explains the problems he has encountered both theoretical and practical and his search for a resolution that is satisfactory both theologically and autobiographically. He ends his apologia with a raft of proposals for the stabilization and enrichment of ecclesial life in the decades to come.  </p>