- Title
- Ernest Burgmann's radical Newcastle years
- Creator
- Hempenstall, Peter
- Relation
- Radical Newcastle p. 78-85
- Relation
- https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/radical-newcastle/
- Publisher
- NewSouth
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- The Christian churches were not normally associated with the 'radical' activism of working people in struggles against evicting landlords, or battles with councils over unemployed workers' camps. The Protestant churches in particular did not have a coherent body of doctrine on the social order; nor did they agree on what constituted a Christian way of life amid economic and financial turmoil. What little debate took place within Protestant churches was centred on Anglicanism. Synods discussed the question of poverty and lobbied politicians for more relief measures. Anglican newspapers carried lively discussions on the merits of capitalism. But the dominant ecclesiastical voices argued that the church was not in the business of offering an economic program for society. There was one exception: Ernest Burgmann, the Anglican Warden of Morpeth' s St John's Theological College in the 1920s and early 1930s. Morpeth became a centre of radical thinking and action during the Depression, its small team of Christian men led by Burgmann, his deputy Roy Lee, and for a little while A.P. Elkin, rector of St James, Morpeth, the future influential anthropologist and policy adviser on Aboriginal society to governments. Burgmann and Lee, and Elkin (though less so), believed in a church whose brief included reforming society and sensitising the conscience of the community.
- Subject
- Ernest Burgmann; Great Depression; Morpeth, N.S.W.; clerical activism
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1309485
- Identifier
- uon:21888
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781742232591
- Language
- eng
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