He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. Larsen's books include The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (2014) and John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life (2018), and he has edited 14 volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (2020). He is also the president of the American Society of Church History.
Larsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One, and shared the following:
Page 99 is in a chapter titled, “The Moral Theologian,” which is a biographical study of Kenneth Kirk, who, after serving as a military chaplain in World War One, went on to become a professor of Moral Theology at Oxford University, and then bishop of Oxford. This page is presenting his Anglo-Catholicism, that is, his desire for the Church of England not to be thought of as Protestant, but rather to be closer to Roman Catholicism in its beliefs and practices. The first half of the page focuses on Kirk’s enthusiasm for orders of Anglican nuns and monks. The second half of the page opens a new section. It presents Kirk’s opposition to theological liberals in the Church, and his unyielding, zero-tolerance stance on divorce.Learn more about The Fires of Moloch at the Oxford University Press website.
I don’t think this page either strongly supports or contradicts the Page 99 Test. It is less lively than a lot of the book, and so not the page I would have chosen. Still, it does reveal what much of the book is doing, which is giving the life stories of priests who served as military chaplains in the First World War. One sentence, which passes the test well because it keeps war and the military in view (as the book hopes to do throughout) is: “The bishop of Oxford observed that he thought of the Religious communities as the ‘commandos’ of the Church.” It is certainly a revealing choice to tell a group of cloistered, contemplative, elderly nuns that they should think of themselves as a crack military unit. The connection of the issue of divorce to war is explained elsewhere, “Both world wars tempted people into ill-advised marriages and created strains which led to divorce.” The theme of divorce continues in the next chapter which, in a playful interaction with the previous chapter, is titled, “The Immoral Dean.” It is about a prominent Anglican priest whose marriage broke down because of his serial adultery.
The Page 99 Test: John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life.
--Marshal Zeringue
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