Herbert Hensley Henson

In Kernels and Husks, John Peart-Binns alleges that Herbert Hensley Henson, eighty-sixth Bishop of Durham, was one of the most distinctive and distinguished bishops of the Church of England in the 20th century.One of the main controversialists of the Church of England, and famously outspoken throughout his life (which spanned some of the most important periods of the 20th Century), Hensley Henson overcame adversity, and fashioned his own course in life and within Anglicanism.While covering all the traditional biographical ground - Henson's education at Oxford, the highlights of his career as pastor of Ilford and Barking Church, as canon of Westminster Abbey, and as bishop of Hereford and Durham - Kernels and Husks does true service to Hensley Henson by going beyond the dates and locations.By exploring in some detail the life of Hensley Henson's father before addressing his primary subject's own eighty-four years, Peart-Binns is able to provide a background to Hensley Henson's childhood and assess the effect it had upon the development of the Bishop's character. It is this richness of psychological insight that allows this new work to convey Henson's magnetic personality and thus shed light on his preaching style as well as and his controversial views on the political and theological issues of his day - divorce, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany.