Richard Holloway, born 26 November 1933 in Alexandria, Scotland, served as Bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 to 2000 and as Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church from 1992 until his retirement. He built his reputation as one of the most theologically restless bishops of his generation, willing to say in public what many clergy confessed only in private.
Holloway trained at Kelham Hall and Union Theological Seminary before parish work in Glasgow, England, and the United States led him back to Scotland and eventually to Edinburgh’s cathedral pulpit. As bishop he championed the ordination of women and the full inclusion of gay clergy well before either position found wide acceptance in the Anglican Communion, and he wrote steadily for a public audience rather than only for fellow clergy. Godless Morality argued that ethics needs grounding sturdy enough to hold without appeal to supernatural sanction. Doubts and Loves and his memoir Leaving Alexandria trace a mind that kept its reverence for ritual, mystery, and the moral seriousness of religious life while shedding claims to metaphysical certainty he no longer found credible. He resigned his see in 2000, worn by internal church conflict, and continued writing, broadcasting, and lecturing into his nineties, publishing Last Words at ninety-one.
Holloway’s core instinct, that faith is a stance taken toward uncertainty rather than a settled possession of answers, parallels how Mormon Transhumanists understand pancritical rational faith: trust that motivates work and stays open to revision rather than trust that forecloses inquiry. His insistence on grounding morality in something that functions independent of supernatural guarantee resonates with an ethic built on compassion and consequence. Although Holloway approached religion from within the Anglican tradition rather than Mormon theology, his ideas have influenced Mormon Transhumanist reflection. Carl Youngblood’s 2013 essay “Demythologizing Mormonism,” for example, draws heavily on Holloway’s Gresham College lecture series “The Myths of Christianity.”
His legacy is less a system than a disposition: hold your tradition’s rituals and moral demands seriously, subject its metaphysical claims to honest scrutiny, and let the two commitments coexist without pretending the tension is resolved. That disposition offers a genuine resource to any postsecular effort to keep religious depth and intellectual honesty in the same room, Mormon Transhumanism included.