Douglas Knight

My word is my bond? Rebuilding trust – the G20 and beyond
St Paul’s Cathedral Tuesday 31st March, 2009, 11am – 12.30pm
On the eve of the G20, St Paul’s is hosting a high level debate about the moral questions raised by the dramatically changing world we find ourselves in. Can opportunities for society’s good [...]

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The native Dutch are moving out. Since 2004, more indigenous Dutchmen have emigrated each year than immigrants have moved in. People who have lost faith in God do not fight. They run. Since they do not believe in life after death, this life is the only thing they have to lose. One emigrant Dutchman, a [...]

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During the decade leading up to the crisis, current account deficits increased steadily and became unsustainable. Strong domestic investment (much of it in unproductive residential construction) outstripped domestic saving. Government budget discipline dissipated; fiscal policy became pro-cyclical [ie, not counter-cyclical]. Financial regulation and supervision was weak to non-existent, encouraging credit and asset price [...]

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John Médaille The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace is far-and-away the best book I have seen on the (bad) theology of economics. It puts economics into its political-philosophical context, with plenty of history, Catholic Social Teaching and immediate relevance to our present situation. It is a big but very well controlled [...]

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What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are [...]

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The day humanity starts eating the planet
On September 23, humanity will have used up all the resources nature will provide this year, according to the latest data from Global Footprint Network and its member organisation NEF (the new economics foundation) who devised the concept of Ecological Debt Day. Just like any company, nature has a [...]

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I like the look of
Charles T. Mathewes A Theology of Public Life
What has Washington to do with Jerusalem? In the raging debates about the relationship between religion and politics, no one has explored the religious benefits and challenges of public engagement for Christian believers – until now. This ground-breaking book defends and [...]

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Here are a couple of titles that caught my eye while putting together a bibliography for next term’s Old Testament course
Aidan Nichols Lovely like Jerusalem: The Fulfillment of the Old Testament in Christ and the Church

The highly regarded spiritual writer and theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P. presents an overview of the Old Testament by [...]

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You’ve written that the nation state has become a “parody of the Church” and that we should treat it like the “phone company.” How far do you think the state has overreached itself in this country?

William Cavanaugh: The phone company quote comes from MacIntyre. He says that the nation state is a dangerous and unwieldy [...]

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Christopher Roberts Creation & Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

Does sexual difference matter for marriage? Are there good theological reasons why the two main characters in a marriage should be a male and a female, or is marriage a more flexible covenant, which any two people can keep? [...]

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One of the points made was that many religious houses, whilst centred deeply on prayer and the eucharist, have allowed the study of scripture to fall into neglect. When it does take place, it is predominantly the individual religious who ‘studies scripture’, meditating alone with his or her Bible. Aside from recitation of the psalms [...]

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The “common good” is more than a political slogan. It’s more than what most people think they want right now. It’s not a matter of popular consensus or majority opinion. It can’t be reduced to economic justice or social equality or better laws or civil rights, although all these things are vitally important to a [...]

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Jon D. Levenson is an exceptionally interesting biblical scholar – I hope you know his Sinai to Zion, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, The death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son and The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies
Now Levenson has produced another:
Resurrection and the [...]

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Rusty Reno on why he left the Episcopalian Church for the Roman Catholic Church
Newman is excruciatingly detailed in his account of his own thinking, but for my purposes, I can simply report his conclusion: he came to think that the basic rationale for Anglicanism lacked validity. Even more strongly, he came to think that [...]

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Another famous Englishman tackled the atonement recently. On Palm Sunday Sam Wells preached How does Jesus save us?
First indulge a little wistfulness.
Wells went off to the States a couple of years ago. Had he stayed he would be in the Anglican front row – which presently consists of Rowan Williams, Oliver O’Donovan, Tom [...]

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Neil MacDonald is good at titles. What do you think of his latest?
Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments

or of his earlier
Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein, and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment

So what are the reviews like?
“Neil MacDonald’s reflection moves [...]

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In order to recover its Christian roots, Europe needs the re-emergence of Christian unity. In their present state of separation, the causes of which lie in the distant past, the Christian churches cannot call effectively upon the nations of Europe to remember and reappropriate the spiritual and cultural resources of their Christian past. The ruptures [...]

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Just seen the bibliography of Oswald Bayer at Wiki.de and remembered what a colossus Bayer is.
He is Professor Emeritus at Tübingen, a Lutheran, but more than that, he is a Luther – really shocking evangelical power, wielded with very great intellectual sophistication and gentleness. His line is that the Reformation is much more modern [...]

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Another great European about to be launched into the insular English-speaking world is Robert Spaemann, a Catholic moral philosopher who until recently taught at Munich.
Robert Spaemann Persons: The Difference between `Someone’ and `Something’, translated by Oliver O’Donovan, appears in the Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics series.
Spaemann has also authored [...]

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The key…lies in the fact that the Temple was understood to be not only the centre of the world but also a microcosm of the whole creation. To speak of heaven and earth passing away quite naturally evoked the image of its destruction. Conversely, to destroy the Temple was to destroy the universe.
That a temple [...]

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