David Clough

Consuming Animal Creatures: The Christian Ethics of Eating Animals

This article argues that Christians have strong faith-based reasons to avoid consuming animal products derived from animals that have not been allowed to flourish as fellow creatures of God, and that Christians should avoid participating in systems that disallow such flourishing. It considers and refutes objections to addressing this as an issue of Christian ethics, before drawing on a developed theological understanding of animal life in order to argue that the flourishing of fellow animal creatures is of ethical concern for Christians. Since the vast majority of animal products currently available for purchase are derived from farmed animals reared in modern intensive modes that fail to allow for their flourishing, and this practice is harmful for humans and the environment as well as farmed animals, the article argues that Christians should avoid consuming these products.

Not a Not-Animal: The Vocation to be a Human Animal Creature

This article diagnoses and critiques two ‘not-animal’ modes of theological anthropology: first, the construction of human identity on the basis of supposed evidence of human/non-human difference; second, accounts of the human that take no account of God’s other creatures. It suggests that not-animal anthropologies exhibit poor theological methodology, are based on inaccurate depictions of both humans and other animals, and result in problematic construals of what it means to be human. Instead, the article concludes, we require theological anthropologies that take as a starting point the relationship between humanity and God and recognise the animal and creaturely context of human existence.

Claiming Barth for ethics: The last two decades

Since 1990, there has been something of a reversal in scholarly opinion regarding Karl Barths forays into Christian ethics. Against the previously held conclusion that Barths account of divine action overwhelms the possibility of human agency and therefore any meaningful basis for ethics, more recent scholarship has tried to show that Barth did in fact take seriously the human being as moral agent. This article surveys the key publications from the past twenty years, in places bringing them into critical dialogue with one another, before assessing what can be learned about Barths contribution to Christian ethics. There is discussion of Barths relationship to casuistry and natural law, as well as the extent to which modern scholarship must rework Barths theological ethics in order for it to publicly viable in the future.

Conjuring A ‘Spirit’ for Sustainability: a review of the socio-materialist effects of provocative pedagogies

Evidence suggests that wider sociological structures, which embody particular values and ways of relating, can make a sustainable living and working problematic. This chapter introduces ideology critique, an innovative methodological perspective crossing the fields of theology, cultural studies and politics to examine and disturb the subtle and hidden ‘spirit’ which is evoked when we engage with everyday objects and interactions. Such a ‘spirit’, or ideology, embodies particular models of how humans relate to other humans, animals and the planet more broadly. This chapter aims, first, to document and demonstrate the subtleties of how the hidden ‘spirit’ can render attempts at sustainable working futile in the context of education, and then, second, to demonstrate how it can be used to intentionally evoke alternative ‘spirits’ which afford new relationality amongst humans, animals and the planet. In a broader sense, therefore, this chapter explores how concepts and political commitments from the humanities, such as ideology critique and ‘spirit’, can help (1) analyse how wider social structures shape our values and beliefs in relation to sustainable learning, living and working, (2) explain how these behaviours are held in place over time and (3) provoke insight into how we might seek to disrupt and change such persistent social structures.

Book Review: Jonathan K. Crane (ed.), Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical AgentsCraneJonathan K. (ed.), Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). xiv + 278 pp. £24.00. ISBN 978-0-231-17417-6 (pbk)

Second, Cavanaugh chastises ‘orthodox economics’ for teaching the fiction of autonomous individualism. Consumers are lone wolves prowling malls and websites in a hunt for something to buy, and successful entrepreneurs are self-assured individuals who depend on their grit and tenacity rather than the help of others. Again, there is some truth to his admonishment. Market exchange does not necessarily promote community or solidarity with others, and may even prove corrosive. As a consumer I may delude myself into believing that I don’t need others because I can purchase whatever services I might require. But it is a delusion that diminishes human flourishing given the bonds of imperfection that bind people to one another. Cavanaugh is right that autonomous individualism is a fiction, but I am not convinced that it is taught as wholeheartedly by orthodox economists as he claims. A non-cursory reading of modern economics dismantles this fiction, because market exchange is an utterly interdependent exercise. Buyers need sellers, employees require employers, lenders need borrowers, merchants depend on customers, and so on. Market exchange is driven by competition, but it ceases to function in the absence of reciprocally cooperative relations as well. This need for mundane cooperation should be acknowledged and given its due. Admittedly market exchange is not synonymous with human flourishing, but that does not make it unimportant for it is an effective means of promoting material wellbeing. Concomitantly, the commercial corporation is certainly not synonymous with the body of Christ, but that does not disqualify it from contributing to the common good. Working in a commercial corporation teaches, at least implicitly, that it cannot survive, much less succeed, without the wide-ranging cooperation of directors, managers, employees, governmental agencies, suppliers, distributors and customers. That is not a bad lesson to be learned, even by the members of Christ’s body.

Book Reviews : The Market Economy and Christian Ethics, by Peter H. Sedgwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 325 pp. hb. £37.50. ISBN 0-521-47048-X

depends on divinely sanctioned violence that follows from the assumption that doing justice means to punish’ (p. 203). In the final pages of The Nonviolent Atonement, Weaver summarises his arguments against Anselm, stating that the satisfaction motif should be abandoned (p. 228). I have a few minor criticisms of this book. First, Weaver includes too many examples of black, feminist, and womanist theologians: fourteen in all. Weaver persuasively shows why their contributions to debates surrounding the atonement are essential; yet he should have been more selective in introducing some of his fellow critics of Anselm. Second, because so much space is given to contextual theologians, the conversation with Anselm and his defenders is shorter than it could have been (forty-four pages). This is unfortunate because this is where Weaver’s case against Anselm and for narrative Christus Victor is especially compelling. Finally, this reader was frustrated with the repeated summaries of the book’s arguments, which not only appear at the end of each chapter but also at the end of several chapter sections. While this can be convenient for readers who want to read the book from any one place, it tends to get in the way of an otherwise stimulating read from beginning to end. Again, I consider these criticisms to be minor. The Nonviolent Atonement is

The Message of the Medium: the Challenge of the Internet To the Church and Other Communities

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.1