Share:

Learn More

Professor, Church History and Church Music

The Rev’d Stephen McClatchie, PhD

Although my academic training is as a musicologist (BMus, PhD), I undertook extensive theological studies in preparation for ordination as an Anglican priest. I currently teach courses in church history, music and liturgy, and theology and the arts and am the Chair of the Graduate Program in Theology. As a musicologist, I have specialised in Austro-German music and culture from about 1850 to 1945, with a particular focus on Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. These composers fascinate me because their music strives to attain transcendence; it attempts to reveal the essence of things, Truth itself. My current research brings a theological lens to this longstanding interest in musical aesthetics by examining how music forms the hidden heart of the theology of St. John Henry Newman.

I am also interested in patristic treatments of music, theological aesthetics, liturgical theology, and in the Catholic revival within Anglicanism (the Oxford Movement).

In addition to my teaching and research, I serve as an Assistant Priest in the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist at Huron. It is important to me to try to model the integration of academic and spiritual/pastoral work through regular preaching and presiding alongside students in formation for ministry.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
“Family Life” & “Organised Religion” chapters in Mahler in Context, ed. Charles Youmans (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
John Henry Newman and Musical Theology in Nineteenth-Century England (monograph in progress)