Ripon College Cuddesdon

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Ripon College Cuddesdon is an Anglican theological college (seminary) located in Cuddesdon, a small village a short distance from Oxford.

1 Tradition
2 Staff members
3 Notable alumni
4 Literature
5 External links

[edit] Tradition

Traditionally Cuddesdon stood in the Catholic wing of the Church of England. The college was founded in 1854 as the Oxford Diocesan Seminary, by Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, as a training establishment for graduates from Oxford and Cambridge and quickly became known as Cuddesdon College . The college buildings, mostly designed by G E Street, were erected opposite his episcopal palace. The "Ripon" part of the college's current name (which deliberately contains no comma) derives from an amalgamation in 1977 with Ripon Hall, a modernist theological college formerly located at Boar's Hill near Oxford. Current students, who come with a wide range of previous experience, but are not necessarily graduates, pursue a two or three year course of study incorporating pastoral and academic training. Courses of study are validated by Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University. Nowadays Cuddesdon students (of either sex) come from across the spectrum of the Church of England and it is one of the many training institutions that no longer have a distinctively party character. It still maintains a regular and disciplined approach to prayer, and seeks to help students develop a modern critical approach to the Christian tradition as found in the Church of England. Recently it has been integrated with the part-time Oxford Ministry Course, which now operates out of the College.

[edit] Staff members

Among the college's previous staff members are: Edward King, who later became bishop of Lincoln, Charles Gore, bishop of Birmingham and Oxford, and Robert Runcie, archbishop of Canterbury. When Runcie retired from the archbishopric he took the title Baron Runcie of Cuddesdon.

The current principal is the Revd Canon Professor Martyn Percy, who is apparently the only living person to be referred to in Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.