Professor Robert E Warner

Dean of Humanities

I was delighted to join this department in September 2009. The academic team is an exceptional combination of commitment to international research and dedication to provide the best possible student learning experience. I thoroughly enjoy combining academic leadership and management with research, supervision and teaching. My academic background combines the disciplines of literary criticism, theology and sociology of contemporary religion.

Qualifications

  • BA (hons) English & Related Literature York
  • MA Ezra Pound & Modern Poetry York
  • MA Theology Oxford
  • PhD Theology & Sociology of Religion King’s College, London

Overview

I am married to Claire and we have two sons in their twenties. Five years ago we took on the project of renovating a house built in the 1780s, and completed it two years later. I enjoy walks in the country, gardening and photography. My favourite city is Florence.

Supervision

  • PhD theses successfully completed 2008-9:
  • The Tradition of the Gospel Christians: A Study in Identity, Theology and Biblical Interpretation During the Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods.
  • The Anglican Communion - A Quantitative Study of Global Anglican Lay Theology.

Recent doctoral theses

  • Dying to Live: What Learning to Die Teaches about Life.
  • The Performance of Ministry - Developing Resilient Practice.
  • Pastoral Ministry and Transformational Development in Kenya.
  • Religion and Peacemaking in Sierra Leone.
  • The Imago Dei, Mental Health Patients and Christian Spiritual Care.
  • Bordering on Faith: Developing Orthopraxis in Response to Spiritual Need.
  • Theodicy and Practical Theology.

Recent MA dissertation

  • The Pastoral Care of People Living with Dementia.
  • The Annual Walk of Witness from Whittington to Lichfield - A Sociological Study.

Teaching

  • Secularization and pluralism in the British religious economy.
  • Contemporary socio-cultural modifications of religious traditions and practices.
  • Empirical research methods.

Research

Church, culture and secularization; religion and identity; sociology of contemporary Christianity; voluntarist religion and the rise of neo-Pentecostalism; literature and religion, with particular reference to the 19th and early 20th century novel; theological reflection at the interface with sociology, literature and hermeneutics.

AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society: 3 year award of £334,000, 2009-2012, with two colleagues from the universities of Durham and Derby. One of six awards made in this phase of funding. An empirical study of Christian faith and the university experience, examining Roman Catholic, mainstream Protestant and evangelical student groups.

Published work

Books

  • Secularization and its Discontents. Forthcoming, London, Continuum, 2010.
  • Reinventing English Evangelicalism, 1966-2001. A Theological and Sociological Study, Carlisle, Paternoster, 2007, pp. xx, 284.
  • 21st Century Church, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994 (2nd edition, 1999), pp. 224.

Peer reviews of most recent book

This outstanding book draws on extensive research and first-hand experience to present a balanced account of recent British
evangelicalism. Its incisive analysis of the present situation and future prospects of evangelical Christianity will be of interest to
participants and scholars alike, and it will quickly become a key point of reference for all work in the area.

Professor Linda Woodhead
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University
Director AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme

The process of evangelical polarisation, which has a strong bearing on the future prospects of Christianity in Britain and in other parts of the world, is illuminated in this book as never before. It includes lively commentary, carefully garnered statistics and thorough analysis of statements of faith.

Professor David Bebbington
Department of History, University of Stirling

Based on inside knowledge as well as telling statistics and sound sociological method Rob Warner's study of The Evangelical Alliance in the late 1980s and 1990s tells a masterly though sobering tale of an era of evangelical entrepreneurs who had great success in gathering together the evangelical clans but suffered from a seeming inability to separate reality from hype, or what Dr Warner calls 'vision inflation'. The book is a must for every serious evangelical leader as well as seasoned sociological scholars.

Professor Andrew G Walker
Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture, King's College, London

Future planned books

  • Faith in fiction: negotiating post-Christianity in novels, short stories and autobiographical writings from George Eliot to D.H. Lawrence (2011)
  • Major publication resulting from 3 year Religion and Society project on Christian faith and the university experience (2013)

Chapters in edited volumes

  • ‘Autonomous Religious Consumption: how congregations are becoming customers' in Michael Bailey, Anthony McNicholas, Guy Redden et al (eds.) Mediating Faiths: Religion, Media and Popular Culture Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming 2010.
  • ‘Autonomous Conformism: the paradox of entrepreneurial Protestantism (Spring Harvest: a case study)' in Abby Day (ed.) Religion and the Individual, Ashgate Religion and Theology in Interdisciplinary Perspective Series, in association with the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, pp. 151-178. 
  • ‘York's evangelicals and charismatics: an emergent free market in voluntarist religious identities' in Sebastian Kim & Pauline Kollontai (eds) Community and Identity: Perspectives from Theology and Religious Studies, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp.183-202.
  • ‘Ecstatic spirituality and entrepreneurial revivalism' in Andrew Walker & Kristin Aune (eds) On Revival: A Critical Examination, Carlisle, Paternoster, 2003. pp 221-238.

Journal articles

Forthcoming in 2010-11

  • Transformations of English Evangelicalism: a sociological perspective, Anvil
  • Faith in Fiction: Edwardian Rejections of Victorian Christianity
  • Student Faith: Symbolic Boundaries and Negotiated Values
  • Evangelicals and Obama: Views from Both Sides of the Atlantic
  • The Evangelical Matrix: mapping diversity and postulating trajectories in theology and social policy, Evangelical Quarterly, vol LXX, no.1, January 2008, pp. 33-52.
  • Pluralism and voluntarism in the English religious economy, Journal of Contemporary Religion. Vol. 21, No. 3, October 2006, pp. 389-404.

Invited papers

  • ‘Sociology of Religion and Contemporary Practical Theology', Invited lecture in Seoul, South Korea (April 2009)
  • Oxford Colloquium, November 2008, Kellogg College, Oxford. Early 20th century literary repudiations of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. By invitation of Professor David Bebbington for an AHRC Religion and Society Project.
  • Oxford Colloquium, September 2007, Ripon College, Cuddesdon. Trajectories in contemporary evangelical theology. By invitation of Professors Martyn Percy and Andrew Walker.

I have in recent terms delivered research papers at the universities of Durham, Lancaster, York St John, and the University of Wales, Lampeter.