Gerald McKenny on Barth

I haven't much time to say anything substantial on this (I will do in coming days) but I have recently been reading and re-reading this excellent new book on Barth's moral theology. McKenny is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. The book is thoroughly engaging and hugely accessible for those wanting to get a grip on the contraversial area of Barth's ethics, and the point he advances - that the analogy of grace is central to Barth's theological ethic - is an intesresting one. What I particularly enjoyed is that McKenny is not an avowed Barthian, but an interested reader who is in some places indebted to Barth and in others not at all. If your library has a copy then I'd say find a quiet afternoon and read it, even if you're not interested in Barth's ethics you will find the engagement between McKenny's keenly trained ethics mind and Barth's ethics-in-the-genre-of-dogmatics hugely rewarding.

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What Do You Call a Group of Theologians?

I think the answer should be "an argument", but perhaps that's unfair. I can test my theory this next week, which sees the start of the annual Society for the Study of Theology (UK) conference on the theme of Holy Writ? (The question mark is very suggestive). It looks really good, and the list of plenary speakers is great: Alex Samely (Manchester); Morwenna Ludlow (Exeter); Henk van den Belt (Amsterdam); Walter Moberly (Durham); Anthony Thiselton (Nottingham); Hugh Pyper (Sheffield). The conference lasts several days and is convening this year at York University. I hope to be able to blog a few thoughts from the conference and some info about the plenary sessions, but I shall be presenting a paper at one of the themed seminars on Wednesday afternoon on the interpretation of Barth's ethics of responsibility so may be a bit distracted until then. So watch this space for more info...

Humble Confidence: The Appropriate Theological Attitude

I've just got round to reading January's International Journal of Systematic Theology (IJST). I really look forward to it coming in the post: it is the universal problem of research-students-who-are-within a-few-months-of-submission that we become so engrossed in the topic at hand (in my case Karl Barth) that other things pass us by. So, IJST affords me the opportunity to lift my head from the Barthian-pit and read a few other things and have those bits of my mind that remember what it was like to read freely in any area of systematics re-enlivened (avoiding the Barth essays within the journal...for now). Normally I skip over the editorials and head for the articles, but last night I read Steve Holmes' editorial for the January edition. In it Holmes, senior lecturer in Systematic Theology at St Andrews University, considers with what attitude the discipline of theology must engage with other academic disciplines. He outlines two, before settling on the third.

Paul Nimmo on Schleiermacher

Once again it's been a while since I blogged anything, but I thought I would flag-up this clip from the increasingly successful Modern Theology Timeline created by Tim Hull at St John's College Nottingham, UK. This is a recent interview Tim did with the Edinburgh based scholar Paul Nimmo on Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is a really good interview, and will go a long way to rehabilitating FDES for those who mis-read Barth and reject him outright. Happy watching!

Michael J. Leyden

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