Life after Tragedy

“Padres were given a rough ride by British memoir writers of the First World War. However, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, ‘Woodbine Willie’ to the soldiers, demonstrates how wrong they were. His reflections on the war and its implications for his own Christian faith resonate to this day. The innumerable insights in this powerful book make plain how the conflict’s spiritual challenge still reverberates.”


—SIR Hew Strachan, author of the Oxford University Press History of the First World War


 


“Michael Brierley and Georgina Byrne have judiciously gathered these measured essays on ministry, suffering, tragedy, and hope: they leave the reader more immersed in sadness, admiration, desolation, and ultimately faith. After all, if Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy’s life was a failure, so was that of Jesus.”


—Sam Wells, Vicar, St Martin-in-the-Fields, London


 


“Life after Tragedy is a profound and moving account of the struggle of Christian theology with the ravages of the First World War. . . . Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the earthquake that was the Great War.”


—Jay Winter, Yale University


 


“A significant contribution to the flourishing revisionist scholarship on religion and war, the central essays in this volume . . . offer a set of moving, often provocative reflections on the complex and transformative relations between faith and suffering that are as relevant now as they have ever been.”


—Sue Morgan, University of Chichester, UK