'The jarringly premature loss of John Hughes as a theologian as well as a man, is incalculable. Yet in this collection of essays, as well as in his first book, he has nonetheless left us with a crucial legacy. One could define this as a renewal of the Anglican social tradition, but in a manner that renders it both more theologically informed and more central to Anglican theology as a whole. Such a renewal naturally involves a return to the Catholic highroad of true Anglican sensibility, alert both to the depths of subtler British tradition and to Continental currents, especially those of French Thomism and ressourcement, and of Russian sophiology. The same sensibility was in John's writing strongly attuned to literature, to pictorial art, to labour and to human exchanges of love, but in a rigorous fashion that connected them all to metaphysical and doctrinal vision. It is now up to the rest of us to sustain his work, and in his own joyfully and amicably militant spirit.'

- John Milbank. Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham,

'In all the work of John Hughes, sacramental socialism was reborn and reshaped with a greater intensity for our troubled times. He was David Jones’s ‘cult man’ who ‘stands alone in Pellam’s land’, where he guarded the signa. But in this volume, he has bequeathed us his ‘house treasures’, ‘the tokens, the matrices, the institutes, the ancilia, the fertile ashes – the palladic foreshadowings … the venerated trinkets’. May his readers guard them well and attend to their vital implications.'

- Catherine Pickstock, University of Cambridge, UK,