User:Phillip Medhurst

Phillip Medhurst was born in Leicester, England in 1948. Educated at Alderman Newton’s, a state-funded grammar school, he won an open scholarship to read English at Wadham College, Oxford. After graduation he went on to read Theology as part of his training for the Anglican ministry. On ordination he served in the South London parish of Abbey Wood while qualifying as a schoolteacher at Goldsmiths’ College. For ten years Medhurst pursued a career as a teacher in holy orders in both state-funded and private schools. After a brief stint as a chaplain at Malvern College, Medhurst was received into the Catholic Church (as a layman, with his wife and two children) in 1988. He then spent another ten years supervising the religious life of Catholic Schools in the West Midlands before retiring from schoolteaching to devote his time to writing and fine art. Having become convinced by his experience in secondary schools of the futility and indeed undesirability of purveying religion to minors as part of their general education – an activity which Medhurst has since characterised as “organised hypocrisy” – he has now established himself as an apologist for a Christian Gnosis which cannot be inculcated by so-called Religious Education (although Medhurst has always been a passionate exponent of what Cardinal Newman called “Liberal Education”.) For Medhurst’s Gnostic writings, see http://sdrv.ms/L9J1S8 Maintaining that education for education’s sake is essentially virtuous, Phillip Medhurst has also sustained a belief in the power of Beauty to reveal higher Truth. (For a poetic account of this belief by the Catholic poet Edward Caswall see http://www.bartleby.com/236/112.html ) For this reason, he has pursued an interest in artistic productions which by one means or another are placed in the wayfare of Everyman. This has led to him sharing on Wikimedia Commons (among other public religious art) Bible illustrations and the architectural sculpture created by Walter Gilbert and associates (q.v. on Wikimedia).

Medhurst's purchase and collation of prints illustrating the Bible ("The Phillip Medhurst Collection"), now housed at Belgrave Hall Leicester, was made possible by (and was within the terms of) the Kevin Victor Freestone Bequest. See http://www.flickr.com/groups/the_phillip_medhurst_collection_of_bible_prints and http://www.flickr.com/groups/phillip_medhurst_bible

Medhurst’s own art, most notably “The Genesis Sequence” and “In Memoriam Robert Ujj”, is also publicly accessible, for which search “Phillip Medhurst” at Flickr. See http://www.flickr.com/groups/the_art_of_phillip_medhurst

Medhurst currently divides his time between homes in Calais and Rochdale, U.K. For a more detailed account of his life and work see his Timeline on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/phillip.medhurst For a complete inventory of Medhurst's published (printed) works see www.amazon.co.uk/Phillip_Medhurst