While Mortals Sleep: Reading Phillips Brooks through Twenty-First-Century Eyes, ed. Robert D. Flanagan, by Pickwick Publications, is a collection of essays intended to offer a well-rounded portrait of the celebrated nineteenth-century Episcopal preacher Phillips Brooks. The essays are organized along a biographical arc, beginning by surfacing his mother’s influence, reflecting on his seminary experience, his Philadelphia church experience, his influence at Trinity, Boston, his brief time as Bishop of Massachusetts, and the enduring legacy at Harvard in the Phillips Brooks house. Essays about the poetics of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,’ Brooks’ famous hymn, and the theory behind his preaching fall in the middle of the book. The essays are contributed by the appropriate people, that is to say, representative voices from the locations mentioned; current rectors in Philadelphia and Boston, Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) faculty, Harvard graduates, parish historian at Trinity, Boston. I currently serve as a University Chaplain at Harvard, had the privilege to preach from Brooks’ pulpit as a priest on staff at Trinity, Copley, and received a preaching prize (Yale Divinity School) because I was significantly inspired by Brooks. All of this is to say that the book (and this review!) is both by topic and authors, a living testament to the enduring and wide presence of Brooks in the Episcopal church, in Philadelphia, Boston, Cambridge, and beyond.
Karen Swallow Prior’s chapter on “The Participatory Poetry and Theology of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’” does a thorough exploration of the internal word/sound infrastructure of the hymn, giving us a view we rarely stop for when we listen to the hymn in full. She highlights the curious anchor of the poem in addressing the hymn to the town of Bethlehem. She proposes that “In centering Bethlehem, Brooks’ poem gestures toward a theology of place (62).” By contextualizing it within Brooks’ travels to the Holy Land and the trauma of the Civil War, we come away with a far richer appreciation for the theology and power of the familiar carol.
Ruthanna B. Hooke’s treatment of Brooks’ preaching philosophy makes it clear that his inspiration is as relevant for preachers today as in his own day. She walks us through key points undergirding the phrase “truth through personality” with which he is associated for students of homiletics. He draws a three-part relational dance in preaching between the person of God, the person of the preacher, and the person of the listener. This grammar is surprisingly modern in its relational shape. Hooke shows us how seriously Brooks takes the souls of his hearers, and indeed, his own soul as preacher. His theological anchoring in the Incarnation lets him propose that God in Christ is a person and therefore will be transmitted only and ever through persons.
As a chaplain at Harvard today, I appreciate Mary Catherine Curley’s discussion of the Phillips Brooks house and its role today on campus in encouraging Harvard students to actively ask themselves how their power and privilege of a Harvard education can be offered for the greater good of community, city and society. Although these ideals are no longer tethered at the Brooks house to Christian spirituality, the force of the intention is still consistent with Brooks’ mission and witness.
In several places, for example, the essay on his time at VTS and the chapter on his role at Trinity, Boston, it is clear that there is motivation to explore Brooks’ unexamined white privilege and contextualize his abolitionism with his complicity in the economy of the North, whose ties to slavery are often unseen and unacknowledged. Having co-created the Landscape of Slavery at Harvard Tour as part of my own ministry, I heartily support this intention of reckoning with hidden legacies of oppression in our ancestors. However, the format of these essays made it hard for the acknowledgment of these things to get their full measure of reckoning. Rather, these things are noted, which may be a first step, and perhaps future thinkers can more deeply engage the questions of how entanglement with oppressive systems shapes the leadership of the church.
The book succeeds in honoring Brooks’ legacy and showing how alive it can be even today. It provides a wide survey but its strength is also its limitation; in wishing to have all the right voices and all the right topics, each essay can only go so far, particularly in the deep and subtle work of critically reckoning with his legacy.
(A version of this first appeared in Journal of Anglican Studies.)
While Mortals Sleep: Reading Phillips Brooks through Twenty-First-Century Eyes was edited by Robert D. Flanagan and published by Pickwick Publications in 2025.
Rita Powell holds an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and currently serves as the Episcopal Chaplain at Harvard. Her work in poetry and performance art explores deep knowledge of body and land in the tradition of Christian ritual and philosophy.