Luke Bretherton | University of Oxford (original) (raw)

Rev Dr Luke Bretherton is the Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. Prior to Oxford he was the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology and Senior Fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Before joining Duke in 2012, he was Reader in Theology & Politics and Convener of the Faith & Public Policy Forum at King's College London. Alongside his scholarly work, he writes in the media on topics related to religion and politics, has worked with a variety of faith-based NGOs, mission agencies, and churches around the world, and has been actively involved over many years in forms of grassroots democratic politics, both in the UK and the US. He hosts the "Listen, Organize, Act! Community Organizing & Democratic Politics" podcast.

His primary areas of research, supervision, and teaching focus on the intersection of systematic, moral, and political theology, while at the same time making connections between these and social scientific, critical, and other ways of analyzing contemporary social, economic, and political life.

His latest book in A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

His fourth book is Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans, 2019), which provides an introduction to the history of and contemporary reflection on the relationship between Christianity and politics. Through addressing questions about poverty and injustice, the formation of a common life with strangers, and the handling of power, it develops an innovative political theology of democracy.

His third book, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015), grew out of a four-year ethnographic study of a multi-faith, broad-based community organizing initiative and assesses the interaction between Christianity, radical democracy, globalization, secularity, responses to poverty, and patterns of interfaith relations.

His second book, Christianity & Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), which won the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing, analyzes the church’s involvement in social welfare provision, community organizing, the treatment of refugees, and fair trade in order to develop an inductive account of what faithful, hopeful, and loving forms of social and political engagement entail.

His first book, Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Ashgate, 2006) explores the theological responses to moral pluralism in critical dialogue with Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy. It develops a constructive, theological response to the issues identified through the motif of "hospitality." The book uses euthanasia and the hospice movement as a case study through which to examine the implications of this response.
Address: Christ Church
St Aldate's
Oxford OX1 1DP

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