Description
About the book
This book is a compilation of lecture notes, talks and homilies by Albert Nolan OP (1934 – 2022), dating from the 1970s through to the 2000s. Many, if not all, were found after his death and were unpublished till now. Many readers will recognise in them similar themes as those in Nolan’s Jesus Before Christianity and Jesus Today. Many are based on his experience, and the lessons he learnt as a university student chaplain to Catholic students in South Africa and internationally.
As Nolan himself wrote: ‘In the early 1970s, that is when I became a university chaplain, I tried to teach the Catholic students theology or Christian doctrine. I failed. They were bored to tears. Eventually I came to the conclusion that they were not interested in any kind of doctrine. Christian faith after all is not basically about doctrine. Christian faith is about a person, Jesus of Nazareth. So, I began a series of talks about Jesus as a person—his life, his struggles, his aims, and his significance for us today in South Africa. That was an unbelievable success. Later it became a book: Jesus Before Christianity.’
This book follows a similar trajectory, trying in simple and yet profound depth to detail aspects of Following that Man Jesus.
‘Albert Nolan had the ability to write about things so simply that I have struggled for years to express with the same clarity.’
Frank Moloney, SDB (1940–2025) was a member of the Pontifical Theological Commission from 1984–2002 and taught Biblical Studies—New Testament—in Theological institutions in Australia and the USA.
About the author
Albert Nolan was born in Cape Town in 1934 to a family of Irish extraction. He joined the Order of Preachers in 1954, and after completing studies for the priesthood at St Nicholas Priory in Stellenbosch, pursued doctoral studies at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum, in Rome. In the 1970s, he served as National Chaplain for the National Catholic Federation of Students (NCFS) and National Chaplain for the Young Christian Students movement (YCS) in South Africa. Thereafter he worked for the Institute for Contextual Theology (ICT) and edited an ecumenical magazine, Challenge. He was elected Master of the Dominican Order in 1983 but was allowed to decline so as to continue his work against Apartheid in South Africa. He was involved in drafting and editing the 1985 Kairos Document, a call from pastors and theologians to the churches of South Africa to fully embrace the struggle for democracy and to put their institutions at the service of nonviolent resistance. He served terms as student master, novice master and provincial for the Dominicans in Southern Africa. Awarded the ‘Order of Luthuli in Silver’ by then President Thabo Mibeki in 2003 for his ‘life-long dedication to the struggle for democracy, human rights and justice and for challenging the religious ‘dogma’ especially the theological justification for apartheid,’ Nolan inspired a generation of Christian activists and theologians. He died peacefully in his sleep on 17 October 2022, at Marian House in Boksburg, where he spent the last years of his life as chaplain to the Newcastle Dominican Sisters.
About the editor
Neil Mitchell, OP, is currently Promoter for Justice and Peace and Student Master in the Southern African Vice Province of the Dominican Order. He is also a lecturer in Moral Theology and Church History at St Joseph’s Theological Institute, Cedara, South Africa. In his student days at the University of the Witwatersrand, he was inspired by Albert Nolan when Nolan was national chaplain to the National Catholic Federation of Students. He was a novice of Nolan’s in 2011, and a member of a contemplative book club which Nolan was instrumental in establishing and leading.
