Luke Bretherton

The Duty of Care to Refugees, Christian Cosmopolitanism, and the Hallowing of Bare Life

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.

Tolerance, Education and Hospitality: A Theological Proposal:

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.

Democracy, society and truth: an exploration of Catholic social teaching

This article maintains that modern Catholic social teaching took shape by positioning itself between revolutionary ideologies that sought to destroy the church and reactionary forces that sought to instrumentalise it. Among the factors that contributed to this development were the emergence of a theologyical and socio-political conception of the laity, reflection on the question of how humans participate in Christs rule, the development of a consociational vision of sovereignty in distinction from top-down or monistic views, the importance of labour to a proper understanding of human dignity, and the discovery of ‘society’, as distinct from the market and the state. Appreciation of these factors resulted in the magisterial defence of democratic politics as a necessary condition for telling the truth about what it means to be human.

Fast Food: A Critical Theological Perspective

Abstract Mass fast food pervades modern society. We here offer a critical theological appraisal of fast food and of the nexus of social values of which it is part. We assess its production and consumption within the doctrinal contexts of creation, fall and redemption, and identify tensions between fast food culture and theologically-formed approaches to food and eating. The continual availability of fast food, its homogeneity, and its dislocation from locally-shaped eating practices can all be seen as aspects of humankinds fallen state, and ultimately as signs of misdirected appetite. They contrast with the inculturated and social character of faithful eating, including with some other historic and present-day takeout cultures.

Democracy and the Criminal Justice System

There seem to be a number of core arguments driving this fascinating and compelling account of the history and current state of play of the US criminal justice system. It is an important contribution to a growing body of scholars calling for reform of the system and its accompanying archipelago of imprisonment. Foremost among these is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Like Alexander, Stuntz pays particular attention to the distinctive and prejudicial impact of this system on young black men and women. Rather than seeking to deconstruct the system as such, Stuntz develops a constructive critique and series of proposals for how to improve the system. These proposals are remedial rather than revolutionary. This for me is a virtue rather than a vice. I think it may be justly claimed that his is a loosely “Augustinian” vision that takes its bearings from common law rather than utopian schemes of social engineering and thereby has a sober sense of what a criminal justice system can entail given the finitude and fallenness of the human beings running it. Yet at the same time, Stuntz has a hopeful sense that constructive if incremental change is possible and that, above all else, the frail personhood both of those subject to the system and those running it should be our lodestar. This Augustininian sensibility comes through with particular force at the end of the book when Stuntz states in reference to those currently imprisoned:

Poverty, Politics, and Faithful Witness in the Age of Humanitarianism

Beginning with a critique of humanitarianism, this essay explores alternative, theological ways of framing responses to the poverty and suffering of strangers. A particular focus is the differing kinds of neighbor-love at work in humanitarianism and democracy and how a christological and eschatological frame of reference re-configures them so as to enable the formation of a people that seeks the flourishing of the whole.

Book Review: Oliver O’Donovan, Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology, Volume 1: An InductionO’DonovanOliver, Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology, Volume 1: An Induction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013). xiii + 138 pp. £16.99/US

bears the divine likeness’ (p. 191). For Mumford this understanding of the imago Dei provides an ‘alternative theological ground for recognition’ (p. 192), and one which more clearly secures the value and rights of every human other, including the newone: ‘If the imago Dei is indeed a normative concept according to which the one made in God’s image commands respect, then the creature making his or her first appearance in the world is to be included within the sphere of concern’ (p. 191). Without disagreeing with Mumford, it is at this point that a clarification may be in order. What is the nature of the relationship between this final theological chapter and the preceding ones? In other words, what role does Mumford’s appeal to theology play with respect to his ‘strictly phenomenological investigation’ of human emergence? With this final chapter he seems to hold that theology can provide the solution or alternative to a series of problems and exclusions that have been disclosed phenomenologically. In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer raises a concern with this use of theology: ‘The kind of thinking that starts out with human problems, and then looks for solutions from that [theological] vantage point has to be overcome—it is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ, and thus the way of all Christian thought, is not the way from the world to God but from God to the world’ (Fortress Press, 2006, p. 356). Bonhoeffer’s concern is that appealing to theology to solve worldly (or philosophical) problems limits theology and its significance. A genuinely theological approach, by contrast, more radically resituates how we even understand such problems. The question that arises, then, is whether Mumford, by explicitly turning to theology only in his final chapter, similarly limits theology. Does Mumford foreclose a more critical and irruptive role for theology with respect to a phenomenology of human emergence? What would it mean for theology to resituate such a phenomenology and how it should proceed? Of course the other possibility is that deep theological commitments are driving Mumford’s investigation throughout. In either case, however, a more explicit statement on the nature of the relationship between theology and phenomenology would have been helpful. This issue in no way detracts from Mumford’s remarkable achievement in Ethics at the Beginning of Life. This book says something genuinely new, and provides a welcome intervention within the context of over-determined and intractable debates about the beginning of life. It deserves to be read carefully by anyone with interests in theological ethics, phenomenology, continental philosophy and human life.

25.00 (pb), ISBN 978-0-8028-6921-0.

personal and moving encounters with people suffering from AIDS in Uganda, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is interspersed with a review of the impact of AIDS world-wide and the unjust causes of why women are affected by the virus. The second chapter re-situates sexual ethics not within a theological framework but within’gender analysis’ and in relation to the idea that sexuality is socially constructed. He argues that such a view of human sexuality is not incompatible with natural law. The third chapter assesses John Paul II’s ‘pro-women’ teaching and concludes that the Pope’s understanding of the’ontological complementarity’ of men and women is wrong. In Kelly’s view the Pope’s approach is contrary to the experience of women and to their ’full and equal dignity’. For Kelly, the Church should be ’pro-woman before it is pro-marriage’. In the fourth chapter, he discusses how the Gospel can be good news to gay men and lesbian women and calls for a ’positive spirituality of homosexual relationships’. This is followed in the fifth chapter by a review of official statements on sexual ethics by various denominations, ranging from Quakers to the Roman Catholic Church. The last three chapters of the book are taken up with Kelly’s outline for sexual ethics ’in a time of AIDS’.