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Stratford Caldecott (26 November 1953 – 17 July 2014) was a Catholic author, editor, publisher, and blogger. His work spanned subjects as diverse as literature, education, theology, apologetics, economics, environmental stewardship, sacred geometry, art, and culture. His books include Secret Fire, Radiance of Being, Beauty for Truth's Sake, All Things Made New, and Not as the World Gives. He was a founding editor of the online journal Humanum and a contributor for several online and print journals. He was inspired by the Catholic author J. R. R. Tolkien and became known as a Tolkien scholar. Early life and education Stratford Caldecott was born in 1953, in London, England, to parents who had left South Africa in 1951. The family espoused no particular religious beliefs. As a child, he was sickly and bedridden, and developed a close relationship with his mother. His father was a publisher with Penguin Books, which fuelled Stratford's love of reading. He attended Dulwich College. As a teenager he fell in love with America through his exposure to comic books, their portrayal of the fight between good and evil, and the theme of hope. Between Dulwich and university he went to America, earning money as a "mother's help", and stayed first with a family in New England before touring the continent by Greyhound bus. After a year, he attended Hertford College, Oxford on scholarship and studied Philosophy and Psychology. Caldecott says that at the age of 14 he had what he terms "a philosophical insight" that there was more to the universe than matter and energy. His metaphysical samplings at Oxford led him to seek a religious tradition. Shortly after graduating, he became a member of The Bahá'í Faith. He later explored Sufism and Buddhism, and began a correspondence with the philosopher Robert Bolton, author of numerous books on spirituality. After taking his degree, Caldecott pursued a career in publishing and education as a senior editor for the publishers Routledge, HarperCollins, and T&T Clark. In 1977, he married fellow student Leonie Richards. The ceremony was held in an Anglican ceremony, in deference to her family. He and his wife had three daughters. Caldecott came to realize that the stories which had informed his early youth, those of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the Quest of the Holy Grail, C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings all reflected a Christian worldview. "All along, my imagination had been built on a Christian foundation, and I had never noticed it before. I knew now that in some sense, on some level, I was already a Christian." His reading then turned to Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain and Thomas Aquinas. In 1980 he was baptised into the Catholic Church. This was not well received by his father, who viewed Catholicism as "worse than apartheid". Career Caldecott taught a course called "Christianity and Society" at Plater College in Headington, Oxford. He was a G. K. Chesterton Research Fellow at St Benet's Hall, Oxford. His devotion to Chesterton led to his becoming something of an expert on him. He also served as a commissioning editor for the Catholic Truth Society. From 2010, he and his wife Leonie served as co-editors of the UK and Ireland edition of Magnificat. He became the founding editor of the journal Humanum, under the aegis of the Washington DC John Paul II Institute. Centre for Faith & Culture In 1994 the Caldecotts founded a research centre in Oxford called the Centre for Faith & Culture (CFC), associated with The Chesterton Review and the international review Communio. Its newsletter, the Faith & Culture Bulletin, was offered free of charge. The Oxford Centre was initially a partnership between Westminster College, Oxford and the Edinburgh theological publishers T&T Clark. The two partners divided the costs between them, and the Centre's activities were equally divided between conferences and publications. Before long it also provided a home for the G. K. Chesterton Library created by Aidan Mackey. In 1998, after Westminster College was acquired by Oxford Brookes University, the CFC moved to Plater College in Headington, maintaining its activities with partial support from T&T Clark and from the G. K. Chesterton Institute, founded by Rev. Ian J. Boyd, publisher of The Chesterton Review. In 2002, after the demise of Plater College, the Centre for Faith & Culture merged for several years with the G. K. Chesterton Institute, creating the "G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture", which was eventually based at Seton Hall University in New Jersey with its Oxford Centre in King Street, Oxford. After 2006 Seton Hall ceased to support the Centre in Oxford and it became independent again. Second Spring Caldecott was a co-director of Second Spring, (named after John Henry Newman's famous sermon of 1852, in which Newman predicted a revival of Catholicism in England). Second Spring initially appeared in 1992 as an 8-page quarterly supplement in the American Catholic World Report. In 2001 Second Spring merged with the Newsletter of the Centre and started to appear as an 80-page journal twice a year.The Caldecotts, together with the artist David Clayton, started a company called "ResSource" to develop educational projects in the spirit of Second Spring, but it ceased trading after Clayton took up a post at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire. The Caldecotts, along with their eldest daughter Teresa, eventually founded their own company, Second Spring Oxford Ltd, in order to manage several editorial contracts as well as undertaking their own publishing programme. Thomas More College became the distributor of Second Spring Journal, as well as sending students to a summer school organised by Second Spring in Oxford. Caldecott's blogs "Beauty in Education", "The Economy Project", and "All Things Made New" serve as resource collections on the topics of education, economics and social justice, and perennial wisdom, and served also as forums for a growing network of friends who, under the banner "Second Spring Associates", hoped to expand the reach of his Second Spring work internationally. The work in this direction was temporarily suspended at his death, but in 2017 Leonie used her own funds to re-launch the website at second spring.co.uk, including an online version of the journal, Second Spring Current. Writing Catholicism Caldecott's writing draws on the work of Catholic intellectuals including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II, Henri de Lubac, Luigi Giussani, G. K. Chesterton, John Henry Newman, and Jacques Maritain. Caldecott's articles appeared in Oasis, the National Catholic Register, Touchstone, This Rock, Radical Orthodoxy Journal, The Chesterton Review, Communio and Parabola. He was a senior contributor to The Imaginative Conservative. He organized conferences such as "Beyond the Prosaic" on th.... Discover the Sarah Jane Stratford popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sarah Jane Stratford books.