Stratford Caldecott

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.

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 (religious philosopher), 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".

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.

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.

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.