There is a surprising absence of systematic theological reflection on what the church’s response to refugees should be and how its response relates to wider debates on the duty of care to refugees. This article situates theological concerns within wider philosophical debate on what the duty of care to refugees consists of. The first section critically reviews the debate on how liberal democracies should respond to refugees. The second section, following Georgio Agamben’s characterisation of refugees as ‘bare life’, argues that (...) refugees unveil a deep contradiction in contemporary patterns of political sovereignty. It closes by arguing that while a theological account of political authority points to some roads beyond the crisis, the first task of the church is to properly order its own duty of care to refugees. The last section consists of an exegesis of the second clause of the Lord’s Prayer as a way of giving an account of what such care involves. (shrink)

This article gives a critique of the notion of tolerance and the promotion of tolerance in education as a means of fostering respect for the ‘other’. In its place the theologically specified notion of hospitality is proposed. In the process of doing this, the article addresses three questions: is there an inherent contradiction between liberal philosophies of education and the promotion of tolerance? Is tolerance the best way to enable genuine respect for the ‘other’? And is tolerance something Christians should (...) promote? To address these question, first, definitions of tolerance are assessed; second, the relationship between tolerance and autonomy is analysed; third, an account of how hospitality is conceived within the Christian tradition is set out; and lastly, hospitality and tolerance are contrasted in theory and practice. The article ends by drawing some conclusions for the practice of education. (shrink)

An introduction to Christian ethics that provides a new, constructive framework for Christian moral and political thought. It draws on and integrates classic sources and approaches with contemporary liberationist and critical voices while making the ethical relationship between human and nonhuman life a central concern.

The first part of this article analyzes the Black Power movement within the context of wider debates about how black nationalism conceptualized the need to form a people as a response to white supremacy. The second part examines how white supremacy conditions the nature and form of democratic citizenship in the United States and how the formation of a “nation within a nation” is a vital adjunct to dismantling white supremacy as a political system. Part three situates Black Power within (...) a theological conception of poverty understood as powerlessness. Building on James Cone and Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, it closes by suggesting that forming a people as a response to powerlessness constitutes a double movement of healing and exorcism. (shrink)

This article is a response to Hauerwas’s, O’Donovan’s and Muir’s engagements with Christ and the Common Life. Three distinctions that operate in the book are clarified, namely that between formal and informal politics, bottom-up forms of democratic politics and top-down forms of statecraft, and social and political relations. In setting these out, the distinction between public and private is critiqued and two, interrelated moves made in the book are defended. First, that democratic politics precedes and sustains a liberal polity. And (...) second, that human law and the state should serve the antecedent and superordinate good of association. (shrink)

This is a preface to three essays on different aspects of ontological and economic debt as themes in religious ethics. It frames their contribution by arguing that debt is central to traditions of philosophical and religious ethics yet is woefully neglected as a thematic problem and problematic in contemporary iterations of these traditions. In order to situate debt as a central moral concern, it is argued that any consideration of debt must wrestle with how debt exists on two axes. One (...) is the axis of ontological and economic debt. The other is the axis of debt as an expression of mutuality and debt as a mode of domination. These axes generate deep ambiguities regarding the moral status of debt. But contemporary religious and philosophical ethics struggles to articulate, let alone address, this ambiguity due to being wedded to modern conceptions of the autonomous subject. The essay closes by setting out the themes of the three essays, the connections between them, and how they can be a catalyst for further reflection on this vital but under‐researched topic. (shrink)