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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A few of the money-center banks, some insurance companies and many hedge funds made a series of bad bets. They are insolvent. There is a procedure for insolvency. The banks should be go into receivership and be broken up. The losses should be written off, and that’s that. Nothing new or radical in that solution, [...]

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The Romanian Orthodox parish of Saint George invites you to join us in prayer for the celebration the Divine Liturgy and of the sacrament of the ordination to the priesthood of Deacon Liviu Barbu
His Eminence Josif Pop Archbishop of the Romanian Metropolis of Central and Western Europe will preside over the Divine Service
The Fourth Sunday [...]

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Sense again meets reader in Metropolitan John’s (Zizioulas) latest text in translation. Superb editing by Dr. Douglas H. Knight, coupled with a succinct introduction by the same, should move this book to the top of any reading list among students of theology, ecumenism, international politics, sociology, economics, languages and cultures.
Chapters were compiled across three decades [...]

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The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice – Fulcrum Lecture by the Revd Professor Oliver O’Donovan at the launch of his book
A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The Churches and the Gay Controversy
Monday 27 April 2009, 6.00pm St Mary Islington, Upper Street, London N1 2TX
Rumour has it that there is a group [...]

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The fourth lent talk starts this way:
Christ has laboured on our behalf: he is the provider of mankind’s only free lunch. We may provide for one another as we receive and distribute what he has provided for us. God has acted generously to us, and invites and enables us to be generous and active [...]

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Stuff will be getting a lot more expensive in the not-distant future, and you can bet that the Chinese are not going to be selling it cheaply to us in return for our increasingly worthless greenbacks. Perhaps the only thing more grim than our current economic moment is the economy that is awaiting us. We [...]

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The third lent talk begins like this:
Behind this economic crisis is another crisis, one of morale. Have we become the society that each of us individually ceased to believe in? Because we have assumed that we insulate the economy from all other factors, in particular these factors that I have linked to covenant, to confidence [...]

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In general, we’re pretty comfortable with ponzi models -we live, quite happily, in a ponzi economy, one in which the concept of perpetual economic growth is sold, divvied up again and resold. We live in a Ponzi ecology where we borrow constantly against the future to pay for our present affluence. Is this truly [...]

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Christians have to recover their genius for showing that there are better ways to live and build a good society; ways which respect freedom, empower individuals, and transform communities. They also have to recover their self-confidence and courage. The secular and religious intolerance of our day needs to be confronted regularly and publicly. Believers need [...]

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I am giving a series of four short Lent lunchtime talks, with Q&A, starting Wednesday 11th March at St Stephen’s Walbrook. These will deal with Lent and Easter, Church and Eucharist, and they will be light but theological.

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The second Lent talk starts like this:
To explain why we are facing this flood and these crises we have to think through covenant, love and gift. We will examine them not because these are religious ideas, but because they are fundamental economic ideas. When we attempt to understand economics without them, we achieve incoherence. Economics [...]

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We are also generally aware of the ways that the culture we oppose – of mobility, deracination and placelessness – is also based upon widespread free-riding. The culture of liberalism – writ large – has always free-ridden on the health and vitality of a pre-liberal, even anti-liberal culture. Most basically it assumes the [...]

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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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What might be some of the most basic faith-derived or faith-related values that we might want to put into our present crisis and its challenges? And I’ll simply suggest three. First – keeping promises. On the whole, religious people believe in a divine agent, power or presence that is faithful, consistent, dependable, truthful. As we [...]

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