While Mortals Sleep: Reading Phillips Brooks through Twenty-First-Century Eyes

by Robert D. Flanagan, Ian S. Markham (Introduction)

America’s nineteenth-century preachers and religious leaders moved public sentiment and shaped the nation’s moral character. Equally influencing events were America’s preachers and religious leaders who moved public sentiment and shaped the nation’s moral character. In that class of great religious figures is the Episcopal preacher and bishop Phillips Brooks. The Boston Brahmin and Harvard University graduate rose to heights as an anti-slavery clergyman and indefatigable pastor to congregations in Philadelphia and Boston. Yet, his many achievements must be balanced against his youthful arrogance and his shrewdness.





This book examines the spiritual and moral character of Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) as evidenced through his life and ministry. The volume’s eight essays recognize the most recent academic contribution, by Gillis J. Harp, Brahmin Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (2003), but move beyond it in several crucial ways. This new work seeks to reevaluate Brooks, considering the early twenty-first-century social and racial conflicts and subsequent cultural soul-searching. The contributors portray Brooks as a man filled at times with hubris, classism, and prejudices and at other times with creative passion and pastoral concern for all peoples. While Mortals Sleep focuses less on the external influences upon Brooks and more on his actions and works within his historical context. The essays seek to show his legacy in a present-day light, illustrating Brooks at his best and worst.

194 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 5, 2025

About the author

The Rev. Dr. Bob Flanagan has struggled with mental illness and managed to thrive for over twenty years. He holds a doctorate of ministry degree in Christian Spirituality and is an adjunct faculty member at General Theological Seminary in New York City, teaching on Christian spirituality. He has served for over ten years as a state and federal advocate for and board member of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. His previous book, Growing a Sustainable Soul, won a bronze medal in the Reader’s Favorite International Book Contest. Bob lives with his wife, Lanie, in Bridgewater, Connecticut. They have two grown children.