Moore's Introduction to English Canon Law (4th edn) by Timothy Briden

 Moore's Introduction to English Canon Law (4th edn) by Timothy Briden explores the deeply interesting and immersive topic of English canon law or ecclesiastical law, which is the area of law that governs the Church of England. This textbook explores the constitution of the church, the different types of churches or units, the law around doctrine and worship, church property, legal proceedings, Holy Communion and much more. Therefore, this is a holistic introduction to this topic, which introduces the reader very well to a specialised area of the law.

I enjoyed this book because it adequately explained much of canon law and how it relates to both real life and the church, as well as the different people involved in the church, in clear and easy-to-understand language. There were also footnotes throughout, which provided more detailed sources for the different areas of the law. This was also an extremely unique academic textbook in that it favoured shorter chapters over the really long chapters, which usually make up academic textbooks like this one. The textbook demonstrated just how interesting canon law is and how there are so many interesting laws that govern the church and worship services that congregational members would often not appreciate, many of whom would be ignorant of the fact that such ecclesiastical law even exists.

This book, however, was not without its faults. For one, and to start with the least serious and most picky point, footnotes were included throughout each chapter, but rather than these references and further information being put at the bottom of the relevant page, they were all at the end of each chapter. This interfered with the joy of reading this book and became very annoying, as I had to continuously flip the pages to the end of the chapter to read the references and further detailed information regarding a certain part of the chapter. Also, for an introduction, the information was extremely basic and very much lacked any detail, with frequent references to Halsbury's Laws of England and Wales for this area of the law. It is good to see references to the law in an authoritative text, but it would have been much nicer to have seen this law discussed in much more depth in the main body of the text. The book also seems to have assumed knowledge of the different areas of Christianity, including Baptism and Holy Communion, among many others. It would have been extremely valuable and important to explain the different aspects of Christian worship in more detail for the benefit of people reading this book who do not practice the Christian faith with the Church of England. Finally, and this point very much links with the previous points, the footnotes often mentioned various cases which provide evidence for the point that Briden was making, but none of these relevant cases seem to be discussed at all, let alone in any detail in this textbook. It would have added much value to this introductory textbook, as it would have provided more commentary and explanations of relevant cases within this book.

Altogether, I rate this book three stars as although it lacked detail and at times was annoying to read due to the formatting, particularly of the footnotes, it did still explain the law very clearly and covered the whole topic of English Canon Law in a somewhat holistic manner which provided the reader with an introductory but basic understanding of this deeply interesting area of law. I would recommend this book to anyone studying canon law or involved in either the practice of canon law or being part of the Church of England as a congregation, minister, or lay minister.