Vatican II

This will be the case especially for non-Catholic readers rightly interested in the most influential event in the history of the Church since Trent. * Matthew Walther, The Lamp *The present book has the advantage of brevity: the authors manage to cover an impressive number of issues in ample depth in a mere 139 pages. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals * Choice *Shaun Blanchard and Stephen Bullivant have done us a great service in producing such a readable introduction to the Second Vatican Council. It wears its deep scholarshiplightly, and will be of enormous benefit to educators and students alike. * Salvador Ryan, Irish Theological Quarterly *Shaun Blanchard and Stephen Bullivant’s, Vatican II - A very short introduction, published byOxford University Press in 2023 is both a tool for the researchers who want to find directions, suggestions, bibliographical recommendations andinvitations to discussions and debate, but also a work that can provide answers for a non-specialised reader who wants to come in contact with the event of the Council and its social, religious, historical or theological outcomes. Due to the fact that the language used is available to any category of reader and the information is presented in a manner that does not requestsa specialised preparation, the work is therefore one that could be surely recommended to any category of readers. * Iuliu-Marius Morariu, Astra Salvensis *

Shaun Blanchard is Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Newman Studies. A graduate of North Carolina, Oxford, and Marquette, Shaun writes on a variety of topics in early modern and modern Catholicism. He is the author of The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II (OUP, 2020) and, with Ulrich Lehner, co-edited The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology (2021). Forthcoming works include a monograph on ecclesiology in the late eighteenth-century English-speaking world, an anthology of translated Jansenist sources (co-edited with Richard Yoder), and book chapters on the British and Irish Catholic Enlightenment and the popes and the Enlightenment.

Stephen Bullivant is Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion, and Director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society. He holds doctorates in Theology (Oxford, 2009) and Sociology (Warwick, 2019). He joined St Mary’s in 2009, having previously held posts at Heythrop College, London, and Wolfson College, Oxford. Professor Bullivant has also held Visiting fellowship at the Institute for Social Change (University of Manchester), Blackfriars Hall (University of Oxford), and the Institute for Advanced Studies (University College London). Professor Bullivant has published ten books, including: Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (OUP, 2019), Why Catholics Leave, What They Miss, and How They Might Return (2019; with C. Knowles, H. Vaughan-Spruce, and B. Durcan), The Oxford Dictionary of Atheism (OUP, 2016; with L. Lee), and The Trinity: How Not to Be a Heretic (2015).