Skip to main content

About



Hello! My name is Michael Leyden, and I am an Anglican priest currently serving as Director of St Mellitus College North West, one of five Centres of learning that make up St Mellitus College - an Anglican theological college in the UK. I teach doctrinal theology, theological ethics, and liturgical theology as well as holding the brief for Academic Development. I was formerly a Vicar in post-industrial parishes in the Dioceses of Liverpool and Chester. Currently I am Associate Minister at St Peter's at the Cross in Chester city centre, where I serve on the leadership team. 

Broadly speaking, my research and teaching focuses on dogmatic theology, in particular the interface of doctrine, liturgy, and ethics. I completed a PhD on human responsibility in Karl Barth's moral theology, through which I was able to think about human action, its theological rationale, and what it means to be a moral agent in the light of the person of Jesus Christ. The thesis was supervised by Professor David Clough and Dr Ben Fulford, and examined by Professor Elaine Graham and the late Professor John Webster.

If you really want to, you can find out more about me, including information about publications and conference papers, here

Thanks for reading,

Michael


Popular posts from this blog

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!

Floor tiles, theology, and divine interruption

Today I have had quite a cultured day: we had a family trip down to the Tate Gallery at Liverpool's Albert Dock. It was a welcome relief after a long and difficult week. One of the exhibits at the gallery got me thinking - as I guess art should - and also got me chuckling. Finally it got me theologizing. The exhibit was this: It is, as you can see, a series of floor tiles laid out in a square pattern. It's called "144 Magnesium Square" by American artist  Carl Andre (b.1935). If you are thinking that there must be more to it, you are wrong. That's it. Tiles laid out and cemented to the floor (not exactly very well either - my dad, who is a professional tiler, would not be pleased). And that's what got me thinking and chuckling. The inevitable question to ask when you witness something as plain and ordinary as floor tiles is "is this art?" For many people viewing the exhibit alongside me today, it plainly wasn't: they were saying so quite aud