MOUNT VERNON — Former Cornell College President Philip Secor will return to the campus Tuesday, April 17, to lecture on Richard Hooker, the theologian who founded the Anglican and Episcopal churches. The lecture is at 8 p.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.
Secor served as Cornell president from 1974 to 1984. For the past two years he has been on a preaching and lecture tour of Episcopal churches in the United States following the 1999 release of his book, “Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism.” This is the first full biography of the man considered the premier theologian of the Anglican/Episcopal religious tradition — the equivalent of Luther for Lutherans, Calvin for Presbyterians or Wesley for Methodists.
Hooker is best known for writing “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” the source book for Anglican/Episcopal “doctrine” on a variety of subjects, including church governance, worship, interpretation of Scripture and Christian ethics. It was written in the 1580s and 1590s. Hooker died in 1600.
Secor, of Hellertown, Pa., sometimes dons Elizabethan garb to lecture as Hooker.
A review in the Anglican Journal, the national newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada, said Secor’s “brilliant work” gives “a lively account of the life Hooker must have experienced in the Exeter of his birth and earliest years, the Oxford he knew as an undergraduate and don, the London where he was the master of the Temple Church and the country parish of Bishopsbourne, Kent, where he spent his last years.”