Nicholas Lash (1934-2020)
I learned a few minutes ago that Nicholas Lash had died earlier today. Nicholas was a brilliant, incisive philosophical theologian who was by far the most formidable member of the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge during the time I was a PhD student. He was, as far as I'm aware, the first Catholic to hold a chair in the Faculty since the Reformation. (A laicized priest married to a former nun, he was not, like many people with similar profiles, an enemy of his church. He remained unapologetically and obviously Catholic.) Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and the holder not only of a PhD but also of an earned DD from the university, he was an elegant prose stylist whose work was rarely simple—he sought to remind us repeatedly of the complexity of thought, language, and the human situation—but always stimulating and insightful. He engaged with a broad range of topics and figures—from Newman (the subject of his dissertation and first book) to Marx to William Jame...