Douglas Knight

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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The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics is giving a
One-day colloquium on Professor Oliver O’Donovan’s Ways of Judgment
Tyndale House, Cambridge 3-4 July 2007
Professor Oliver O’Donovan, Edinburgh University
Professor Nigel Biggar, Trinity College, Dublin
Dr. Ben Quash, Peterhouse, Cambridge
Dr. Jonathan Chaplin, Director, KLICE

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There is no doubt that we are living in a moment of extraordinary development in the human capacity to decipher the rules and structures of matter, and in the consequent dominion of man over nature. We all see the great advantages of this progress and we see more and more clearly the threat of destruction [...]

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Reporting on religion in the mainstream British press is not only sometimes dreadful, it’s dangerous, and something needs to be done about it.
Making such a statement does not come easy. Journalists are notoriously reluctant to criticize the work of colleagues, and not just because it’s a great way to make enemies. We know the agonies [...]

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It is in the law that the deep-seated nature of our ‘culture-muddle’ is beginning to be manifest. The secularization thesis which denied real significance to religion, also suppressed intellectual life. By divesting religious actors and institutions of their social, economic and political influence, it at the same time, permitted anomalies to flourish in many disciplines [...]

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The Gospel and our culture network presents
Mission in Christian Soil? Cultural awareness and personal conversion – A day conference with Elaine Storkey

Saturday 15th Sept 2007 Carr Lane Church Centre Birmingham

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People who take the question of human truth, freedom and meaning seriously will never remain silent about it. They can’t. They’ll always act on what they believe, even at the cost of their reputations and lives. That’s the way it should be. Religious faith is always personal, but it’s never private. It always has social [...]

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St Paul’s Theological Centre Annual Lecture
Professor Jeremy Begbie The Emotional Power of Music in Worship: Have We Anything to Fear?

14th June 2007, 7.30pm at Holy Trinity Brompton, London
Jeremy Begbie is Honorary Professor of Theology at the University of St Andrews and Associate Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Jeremy [...]

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In his 1990 apostolic constitution on Christian education, John Paul II insisted that the university is ex corde ecclesiae—from the heart of the Church. He spoke of the Catholic university, of course, but the vision challenges every Christian university. In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, John Paul wrote: “With every other university [the Christian university] shares that [...]

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will tonight give an address at Toynbee Hall, in which he will call for a widening of the debate on multiculturalism beyond narrow considerations of ethnicity or nationality, and to take in arguments about globalisation and commerce.
Delivering the lecture, Dr Williams will address the question of the homogenisation [...]

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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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Dear brothers and sisters, in the catechesis on the prominent figures of the early Church, today we come to the eminent personality of St Irenaeus of Lyons.
…Irenaeus was concerned to describe the genuine concept of the Apostolic Tradition which we can sum up here in three points.
a) Apostolic Tradition is “public”, not private or secret. [...]

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Christianity teaches that each person is created by God with a distinct calling and capacity. For the Christian believer, human dignity – and therefore any notion of human rights – depends upon the recognition that every person is related to God before they are related to anything or anyone else; that God has defined who [...]

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In a striking example of self-analysis, about 500 delegates, including both practising and nominal Muslims, attended an inaugural Secular Islam Summit this month in St Petersburg, Florida.
The declaration was signed by such luminaries as Ibn Warraq, a widely published author, whoA group of prominent secular Muslims has shown the kind of unconditional willingness [...]

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Europe’s current problems are entirely self-inflicted. This does not mean, however, that the result will be less catastrophic. By subverting the roots of its own Judeo-Christian culture – a process that started with the French Enlightenment (as opposed to the Scottish Enlightenment, which was not anti-religious) – a religious and cultural vacuum was created at [...]

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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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I think we’ve reached a point where certain things need to be clarified about the rights, liberties and dignities of independent bodies with the State (the Archbishop of Canterbury to Robert Pigott of the BBC on Jan 24th 2007).
In what follows I want to explore why I think that the Archbishop has offered that careful [...]

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Communicating Bible to Babel
– Exploring and shaping the debate on Christian language and communication in the public square
Liverpool Hope University Friday 28 – Saturday 29 September 2007
For a long time religious discourse has had limited access and impact in politics. In the UK, it is generally acknowledged that Christian political [...]

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I have found three events organised by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster in London
1. First Sunday Plus Young Adult Ministries launches THEOLOGY-on-TAP, a speaker series for young adults 18-39 straight talk, hard facts and real answers about our Catholic faith and how to live it in real, everyday life.
2. Society and [...]

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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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