Many political theorists today appeal to, or assume the existence of, a political culture in which the public values of Western liberal democracies are embedded – a political culture that is necessary to render their ideas plausible and their proposals feasible. This article contrasts this approach with the more ambitious arguments advanced by Jürgen Habermas in his original account of discourse ethics – a moral theory to which, he supposed, all human beings were demonstrably and ineluctably bound by the communicative (...) constitution of collective life. Although these arguments have been largely discredited, I argue that Habermas’ analysis can be enlisted in defence of a weaker claim: namely, that principled commitment to discussion is not always necessary for genuine deliberative engagement to occur. As a result, there may be hope for democratic deliberation in contexts where a liberal democratic political culture is lacking. (shrink)

Leading political theologian Oliver O'Donovan here takes a fresh look at some traditional moral arguments about war. Modern Christians differ widely on this issue. A few hold that absolute pacifism is the only viable Christian position, others subscribe in various ways to concepts of 'just war' developed out of a Western tradition that arose from the legacies of Augustine and Aquinas, while others still adopt more pragmatically realist postures. Professor O'Donovan re-examines questions of contemporary urgency including the use (...) of biological and nuclear weapons, military intervention, economic sanctions, war crimes trials and the roles of the Geneva Convention, international conventions and the UN. His enquiry opens with a challenging dedication to the new Archbishop of Canterbury and proceeds to shed new light on vital topics with which the Archbishop and others will be very directly engaged. It should be read by anyone concerned with the ethics of warfare. (shrink)

Oliver O'Donovan's Ethics as Theology project began withSelf, World, and Time, an "induction" into Christian ethics as ordered reflection on moral thinking within the life of faith. Volume 2, Finding and Seeking, shifted the focus to the movement of moral thought from a first consciousness of agency to the time that determines the moment of decision. In this third and final volume of his magnum opus, O'Donovan turns his attention to the forward horizon with which moral thinking must (...) engage. Moral experience, he argues, is necessarily two-directional, looking both back at responsibility and forward at aims. The Pauline triad of theological virtues (faith, love, and hope) describes a form of responsibility, and its climax in the sovereignty of love opens the way to a definitive teleology. Entering into Restoffers O'Donovan's mature reflections on questions that have engaged him throughout his career and provides a synoptic view of many of his main themes.". (shrink)

Over the course of recent years, various scientific advances in the realm of reproduction have changed the reproductive landscape, enhancing women’s procreative rights and the choices available to them. Uterus transplants (UTx) are the latest of such medical innovations aimed at restoring fertility in women suffering from absolute uterine factor infertility, providing them with the possibility not only of conceiving a genetically related child but also of gestating their own pregnancies. This paper critically examines the primacy of reproductive liberty in (...) the context of uterus transplantation. It questions whether and to what extent we should respect the reproductive autonomy of a woman who chooses UTx, given the significant risks that attach to the procedure and existing concerns that UTx may perpetuate potentially troubling gendered norms surrounding pregnancy and the role of women’s bodies in reproduction, which may place undue reproductive pressures on women. (shrink)

In this revision of a seminal work, O'Donovan describes the shape of a Christian moral theology which has wide implications for creation, history, knowledge, freedom, and authority--his purpose being to outline a system of theological ethics and to describe the nature of the moral response within redeemed creation: acts of surrender, obedience, and love.

Self, World, and Time takes up the question of the form and matter of Christian ethics as an intellectual discipline. What is it about? How does Christian ethics relate to the humanities, especially philosophy, theology, and behavioral studies? How does its shape correspond to the shape of practical reason? In what way does it participate in the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Oliver O'Donovan discusses ethics with self, world, and time as foundation poles of moral reasoning, and (...) with faith, love, and hope as the virtues anchoring the moral life. Blending biblical, historico-theological, and contemporary ideas in its comprehensive survey, Self, World, and Time is an exploratory study that adds significantly to O'Donovan's previous theoretical reflections on Christian ethics. (shrink)

Representation is an essential element of political authority, together with power and judgment, the latest to be acknowledged in the Christian West, coming to recognition in the Middle Ages with the expectation of a plurality of national identities. Its initial points of reference were theological, to Israel and to the dual office of Christ as priest and king, but in modern developments it has been understood especially in terms of legal forms. Government represents an existing political identity, bound up with (...) a tradition of continuing practice and constituted by a ‘common good’ which brings together the various interests within a society. ‘Recognition’ of government involves knowing it in relation to ourselves, by affective cognition, an emphasis lost in modern theories. Success and failure in representation are on a relative scale of more or less. It depends on realistic and truthful popular self-understanding. (shrink)

Digital participatory media offer urban social studies teachers a unique opportunity to foster students' civic skills and public voice while enhancing their understanding of social justice within a democratic society. This article addresses the continuation of a New York City 8th grade U.S. history teacher's journey to use digital tools to foster his students' collaborative and communication skills and to help them learn social justice oriented content. While doing so, he overcame challenges related to technology integration, curricular alignment, selection of (...) appropriate digital tools, and the need to cultivate his students' online academic norms. In doing so, he confronted Livingston's query about whether the use of technology necessitates a “fundamental transformation in learning infrastructure” and the need “to rethink the relations between pedagogy and society, teacher and pupil, and knowledge and participation”. He ended this part of his journey with these new challenges: how to enable his students to become navigators of their learning; ways to align the curriculum with his students' thinking; and, managing a dynamic instructional support system guided by his students' learning. His goal is “to forge a bridge between [his students'] media production and civic engagement'. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals who feel psychologically safe believe it is safe to take interpersonal risks such as voicing concerns, asking questions and giving feedback. Psychological safety is a complex phenomenon which is influenced by organizational, team and individual level factors. However, it has primarily been assessed as a team-level phenomenon. This study focused on understanding healthcare professionals' individual experiences of psychological safety. We aim to gain a fuller understanding of the influence team leaders, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics have on individuals' (...) psychological safety and their decisions to engage in voice or silence behavior. Thirty-four interviews were conducted with healthcare professionals from across five teams working within an acute, suburban hospital. Hybrid inductive-deductive thematic analysis focused on identifying themes which captured the complexities of individuals' varied experiences of psychological safety. The themes identified were: “Personal Characteristics,” “Past Experiences,” “Individual Perceptions of Being Valued,” and “Judged Appropriateness of Issues/Concerns.” These themes are explored within the context of motivating and inhibiting factors associated with the influence of leadership, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics on experiences of psychological safety and voice behavior. These results extend existing theoretical frameworks guiding our understanding of psychological safety by accounting for the variation in individuals' experiences and studying these significant influences on voice behavior. Important considerations for the development of interventions to enhance psychological safety are discussed. (shrink)

Drawing on an analysis of complaint files that we conducted for the Irish Medical Council, this paper offers three possible explanations for the gap between the ubiquity of official commitments to taking patients’ complaints seriously and medical professional regulators’ dismissal—as not warranting an inquiry—of the vast majority of complaints submitted by members of the public. One explanation points to the “regulatory illiteracy” of many complainants, where the remit and threshold of seriousness of regulators is poorly understood by the general public. (...) Another points to possible processes of “institutional epistemic injustice” that unjustly undermine the credibility of certain complainants, such as those with low levels of formal education. A third explanation highlights the marginalization of the general public from “symbolic power” to define what matters in medical professional regulation. The paper is offered in a spirit of ideas in progress and raising questions rather than definitive insights into the regulatory process. (shrink)

In this article, I use a nineteenth-century anatomical collection of wax moulages, currently off-staged in the storage facilities in the university where I work, to think about the matter of human remains. Rather than seeing the gross pathology moulages as inert teaching resources, I propose they are agential assemblages, entangled in which are human remains, and that they can be included amongst the dead. I consider their capacity to perform pastpresence work, a particular kind of work of the dead that (...) foregrounds erasures, such as the erasure of the many confined women suffering from syphilis whose bodies were used to cast moulages. This article considers how such pastpresence work might help us be response-able for uncared-for remains, such as the remains of “disappeared” women and infants who died in so-called Mother and Baby Homes, which have reappeared at the center of contemporary Irish public life. At a time when moulages are being reexhibited in museums internationally, I speculate about whether and how the collection might be restaged to perform subversive and utopian pastpresence work, destabilizing the erasures of conventional narratives of medicine and contributing to the crafting of a new and more careful order of things. (shrink)

A collection of essays with themes in human rights and legal history, spanning several centuries, containing a tribute to one of the most remarkable jurists of our time. Linked by an historical and contextual approach, these essays add to knowledge of legal history and human rights and provide a reference point for future research.

Building on the papers and discussions in this project, my concluding comments indicate fruitful lines of further inquiry into the common and distinctive features of the Christian and Islamic political inheritances and their contemporary appropriation in the two communities. Topics for further exploration include: the hermeneutic approaches to diversity within the authoritative traditions of Christianity and Islam; the extent and nature of the service rendered by political rule to the natural and soteriological goods of moral community; the theological/anthropological underpinnings of (...) the moral limitations and ambiguities of political order and justice; and alternative political modes of accommodating religious plurality in society. (shrink)

An examination and defence of the concept of personality, long central to Western moral culture but now increasingly under attack. Robert Spaemann tackles urgent practical questions, such as our treatment of the severely disabled human and the moral status of intelligent non-human animals.

Throughout his life Karl Rahner wrote on saints in the church, both official (canonized) and unofficial. This essay first considers his major essays from the conciliar period, focusing on the question why and how we can existentially venerate the saints and drawing on his theology of God as Holy Mystery, Christ as redeeming Mediator between humanity and God, and the unity of the love of God and of the neighbor. A second section recalls earlier writings such as “The Church of (...) Sinners’ (1947) and “The Church of the Saints” (1955) that anticipated his mature position. Later developments in his thought are then considered, with special attention to his fuller use of the concept of solidarity in its ontological and theological depth. Finally Rahner’s original diagnosis of the relationship of believers to their saints is tested against more recent developments in devotion to the saints. (shrink)

Reflection on the encounter with theologians as significant as Rahner and Balthasar can lead to a new appreciation for their personal and ecclesial influences. Each saw his work not as a final system but as a limited and relative contribution to the Church’s theology. While Rahner took a concretely dialectical approach to transcendence in history, Balthasar’s cultural theology has a dramatic center of gravity, most obviously in his great final trilogy. For all the difference between their respective horizons, however, both (...) theologians remained fundamentally rooted in the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola. (shrink)

The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the ethical problems that needed to be addressed urgently within public policy were unprecedented and required high‐bandwidth two‐way transfer of insights between academic bioethics and policy. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which do not have a National Ethics Committee, faced particular challenges in how to facilitate this. This paper takes as a case study the brief career of the (...) Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) for the NHS Covid‐19 App, which shows both the difficulty and the political complexity of policy‐relevant bioethics in a pandemic and how this was exacerbated by the transience and informality of the structures through which ethics advice was delivered. It analyses how and why, after EAB's demise, the Westminster government increasingly sought to either take its ethics advice in private or to evade ethical scrutiny of its policies altogether. In reflecting on EAB, and these later ethics advice contexts, the article provides a novel framework for analysing ethics advice within democracies, defining four idealised stances: the pure ethicist, the advocate, the ethics arbiter and the critical friend. (shrink)

Sin has infinite variety, but is also a unified phenomenon. As a way of displaying both these aspects, the vice-lists of the New Testament explore patterns by which sin unfolds in a sequence of diverse but connected forms. The eschatological vice-list of 2 Timothy 3 treats this as an unfolding of the sin of pride from an immanent form to a socially concrete one. Exploring this train of thought in further detail, we find room within the progress of pride for (...) the love of money and the love of war. (shrink)

An ancient Hebrew poem of uncertain background and fastidiously subtle formal technique is made the subject of a commentary by a fifth-century Latin bishop with no Hebrew, working with a poor Latin translation, who, moreover, dismisses the formal complexities of the composition as irrelevant to interpretation. Claiming to detect hidden depths beneath the Great Psalm’s limpid surface, Augustine uses it as an opportunity to revisit some of the favorite themes of his own later writing. Has he read the text with (...) sufficient sympathy to discover anything in it that might correspond to the poet’s intentions? Comparing his approach with Ambrose’s earlier and very different one, we notice some unexpected interpretative strengths in the earlier work. But Augustine’s attentiveness to connections between lines and stanzas and to the repetition of key vocabulary reveals a close attunement to the emotional movements of the poem. His contention that the Psalmist’s “law” is to be understood as Saint Paul’s “law of faith” is not imposed on the text, but allowed to emerge from its sequential development, and especially from its opening and closing lines. (shrink)

An ancient Hebrew poem of uncertain background and fastidiously subtle formal technique is made the subject of a commentary by a fifth-century Latin bishop with no Hebrew, working with a poor Latin translation, who, moreover, dismisses the formal complexities of the composition as irrelevant to interpretation. Claiming to detect hidden depths beneath the Great Psalm’s limpid surface, Augustine uses it as an opportunity to revisit some of the favorite themes of his own later writing. Has he read the text with (...) sufficient sympathy to discover anything in it that might correspond to the poet’s intentions? Comparing his approach with Ambrose’s earlier and very different one, we notice some unexpected interpretative strengths in the earlier work. But Augustine’s attentiveness to connections between lines and stanzas and to the repetition of key vocabulary reveals a close attunement to the emotional movements of the poem. His contention that the Psalmist’s “law” is to be understood as Saint Paul’s “law of faith” is not imposed on the text, but allowed to emerge from its sequential development, and especially from its opening and closing lines. (shrink)

Luke Bretherton wishes to encourage informal political activity, and asserts a contrast between two complementary and alternative ways of doing politics, formal and informal. But the tendency in his descriptions is to replace formal with informal politics, which is then in danger of being left without responsibility to the structures of political society.

This article reviews Michael Laffin’s fresh presentation of Luther’s political theology, which draws on contemporary Lutheran theological scholarship and interpretation to counter the assaults on Luther’s thought by such representative modernity critics as Milbank and Herdt.

Conn O'Donovan looks back on McShane's early years and influences.

PATRICK O'DONOVAN AND LAURA RASCAROLI Introduction: Cosmopolitanism between Spaces and Practices Cosmopolitan Spaces You are standing in the Pantheon in ...

"Content and Comportment argues persuasively that the answer to some long-standing questions in epistemology and metaphysics lies in taking up the neglected question of the role of our bodily activity in establishing connections between representational states—knowledge and belief in particular—and their objects in the world. It takes up these ideas from both current mainstream analytic philosophy—Frege, Dummett, Davidson, Evans—and from mainstream continental work—Heidegger and his commentators and critics—and bings them together successfully in a way that should surprise only those who (...) persist in maintaining this barren dichotymization of the field.". (shrink)

The Incorporated Self demonstrates that although embodiment has long been a central concern of the theoretical humanities, its potential to alter epistemology and open up new areas of dualistic inquiry has not been pursued far enough. This anthology collects the the works of scholars from a broad range of disciplines, each examining the nature of the body and the necessity of embodiment to the human experience -- for our self awareness, our sense of identity, and the workings of the mind.