Revd Dr Jeanette Sears BA PGCE DPS PhD
Tutor in Christian Doctrine and Church History
Jeanette grew up in Nottingham and became a Christian on a Methodist youth camp aged 11. She went on to study Theology at Manchester University, completing a PhD in Nineteenth-century Eschatology in 1984. After a year of teacher training in London, she won a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard to study Twentieth-centuryAmerican Fundamentalist Eschatology as a postdoctoral Visiting Fellow. Meanwhile a renewal experience had helped encourage her towards a call to ordained ministry. After four years at an evangelical/charismatic/anglo-catholic/social gospel (!) Episcopal church in Massachusetts, she returned to England to train at Wycliffe Hall Oxford and completed a Diploma in Pastoral Studies.
She was ordained deacon in 1992, serving a curacy at St Aldate's Church in Oxford, and was one of the first women ordained priest in Britain in 1994. After four years working in London, she returned to Wycliffe Hall in 2001 as Director of Lifelong Learning and helped to teach Doctrine on the part-time Diploma course.
Her personal interests are in writing, film, nineteenth-century novels and sites of historical interest, and she is a member of the C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers Societies. In early September Lee Abbey in Devon held their first-ever conference on Narnia, 'Narnia awake!', led by Jeanette.
Publications
Creative Theology (a systematic theology based on the contributions of the ‘Seven' - Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, Williams, Chesterton, MacDonald, Barfield), forthcoming 2010.
The Oxford of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis (Oxford Heritage Trails booklet, 2006).
Reflections for Daily Prayer (Lent to Pentecost) (London:Church House Publishing, 2009 (contributor).
Book reviews
On Amy Frykholm's Rapture Culture:'"Left Behind" in Evangelical America', Evangelical Quarterly, January 2008.
On Stephen Williams' The Limits of Hope and the Logic of Love, Evangelical Quarterly (forthcoming, 2009)
Fiction
Pig's Progress (Carlisle: Piquant Editions, forthcoming); also audiobook.
A Murder in Michaelmas (Carlisle, Piquant Editions, forthcoming); also audiobook.
A series of murder mysteries is commissioned.
Email Jeanette Sears