Michael J. Leyden

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...

Those of you who have been following this blog through 2011 may or may not be pleased to know neither I nor it has(ve) died, and will be carrying on in 2012 -- though as you might have guessed, my workload will need managing in order to write more often! No-one mentioned that the final quarter of the year would be so busy for clergy...I probably ought to have worked it out earlier. Anyway, now that Advent and Christmas is over, and Epiphany is underway, I have had some time for reading and thinking and thought I would share a bit of what I'm reading. As far as academic work goes, I've been reviewing four books over the past few months. Three of them have been on the subject of Christian ethics, and the fourth another account of the meaning of the atonement. Of these the ethics books have been the most interesting: Neil Messer, Respecting Life: Theology and Bioethics published by SCM (2011); Edward Dowler, Theological Ethics also published by SCM as part of their core texts ...

Ian Paul at Psephizo has posted a copy of Bishop Tom's reflections on the recent events surrounding bin Laden's death here . In a short but thought provoking piece, Bishop Tom asks some important questions about the way we think about justice and the relationship between the gospel and the political manifestation of justice we have witnessed this week. The discussion following, in which I have ventured a few reflections about Reinhold Niebhur's influence on all this, is also quite good. Go and take a look if you have minute or two...

I woke this morning to the news that Osama bin Laden is dead: killed in a fire fight in Pakistan, when US troops stormed the mansion where he was holed up with his closest friends and one or two members of his family. The rhetoric from around the world, including our own Prime Minister, was of justice having been served on the man who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in New York almost a decade ago, and who has masterminded God-only-knows how many more Al Qaeda attrocities since. I confess I was quite relieved when I heard the news, maybe even glad he is dead. Though I have not lived in fear of bin Laden, nor been put off travelling for fear of bombs, I have (as I imagine most people have) bought into the natural unrest that accompanies national events like the Royal Wedding and the ongoing thoughts that something like 9/11 or 7/7 may happen again. More than that I have prayed for and tried to empathise with those who suffered loss because of bin Laden, and I have ...

I mentioned a few weeks back now that I have been reading Commanding Grace, an edited collection of papers from the 2008 US Karl Barth conference. In my last, brief, post I hinted that the collection is really good, and that I was unearthing some absolute gems. The variety of subjects and the level of concrete engagement with Barth on issues of central importance to Christian ethics is really encouraging and exciting. One particularly brilliant essay I have read and re-read is Jesse Couenhoven 's Karl Barth's Conception(s) of Human and Divine Freedom(s) pp.239-255. The main concern of this essay, as the title suggests, is the question of how Barth's conception of divine freedom is related to his conception of human freedom, if at all. It is important to note that it is a conceptual problem that concerns Couenhoven here. He is not asking how divine freedom and human freedom actually relate, not primarily at least, but how Barth's conceptual exploration of each is relat...

  February's edition of Studies in Christian Ethics Journal takes as its theme 'Theological Reflections on Climate Change'. The contents of the journal is the plenary papers from the 2010 SSCE Conference on the same theme. It was a really good conference with several high quality plenary papers as well as several other really good short papers. The plenary speakers were: Celia Deane Drummond, Timothy Gorringe, Michael Northcott, and Peter Scott. The journal also contains an article by fellow PhD candidate and conference attendee Byron Smith. Byron's research and regular blogging here explores issues of environmental theology and climate change. The whole thing is worth reading, and will get you thinking about our relationship to creation and our responsibility before God.

Recently I posted on David Novak's essay on the Australian ABC Religion and Ethics website regarding the legitimacy of gay marriages, and the role of the State in (as he sees it) redefining marriage to include same-sex unions. I thought the essay was better argued than many of those that advance this sort of argument from tradition, though it lacked for me a developed anthropology - which I would want to see developed theologically for obvious reasons. Today the ABC site has published Rodney Croome's response to Novak. Croome is something of a celebrity figure in Tasmania. He is an LGBT rights campainger, an honourary lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania, and recipient of several awards for his humanitarian work. Being British, I confess I had heard little of him but his website certainly suggests that he has had a hugely influential role in the transformation of Tasmania's sexuality laws. He is also campaign co-ordinator for AME . Croome is therefore a r...

I've been working on Church Dogmatics III/4 recently, on Barth's special ethics in his doctrine of creation. Although it is widely known that Barth has real hang-ups about natural theology, and its ethical manifestation as systematic casuistry, it is here in the introductory paragraphs of this volume that he tackles the issue head on in the most comprehensive way. He outlines his basic understanding, and critique, of systematic casuistry and its ultimate failure to take seriously the liveliness of the Living Word addressed to humanity in Christ. However, Barth does allow for a certain kind of casuistry - what he calls 'practical casuistry' - which concerns itself not with the application of static and abstract universal moral principles but with the momentary reflection and decision regarding that same Living Word as it encounters human beings in particular concrete instances. It is this notion of encounter and response that grows out of a pneumatology that takes serio...

I have today been reading an article by David Novak, a Canadian Traditional Jew, professor, ethicist, lawyer, and Rabbi, on same-sex marriage and the role of state legislation. In it he revisits his previous dialogue with the Reform Jewish scholar Martha Nussbaum. Novak's basic position is conservative on the definition of marriage itself. Over against Nussbaum he rejects the idea that marriage is the wedding of two persons to one another - what he takes to be a modern development - and maintains the traditional account that it is specifically the wedding of a male and a female person to one another. The argument he makes does not rest primarily in theological considerations, but on questions about the legitimate role of state legislation with regard to the meaning of the term 'marriage'. Part of his argument consists in his locating the development of marriage within the formation of culture and not polity. Marriage is therefore pre-political in Novak's view, and so h...

In a recent post on Gerald McKenny's latest book on Barth's moral theology I discussed his handling of the 'primordial ethical question' of how human action relates to God's grace. That book proposes a very interesting argument about analogy and continues to fuel my thinking on the subject - something to which I hope to return in blog form in coming days. It is a major question for protestant theology, and moral theology in particular. Barth proves to be an interesting dialogue partner for this discussion. I have recently heard good things about this new volume by Mattew Rose, Ethics With Barth: God, Metaphysics and Morals (Ashgate, 2010). From what I've heard, the author develops an account of Barth's moral theology that argues that his work is best understood along Catholic lines - with nature not as the epitomy of all that opposes grace, but as it fulfilment. This locates nature in the grand narrative of God's gracious dealing with creation, and thus ...

The quality of recent books on Barth's moral theology, as I have indicated elsehwere with reference to Gerald McKenny's latest offering, is high. As well as McKenny, I have been occupying myself with a new volume of collected essays, edited by Daniel Migliore, entitled Commanding Grace: Studies in Karl Barth's Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). The volume is the published papers of the 2008 Karl Barth Conference, held at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA. I have so far only given light reading to several of the chapters, and must return to them in coming weeks with a more serious eye to the detail of the arguments presented (not least because I'm reviewing it for Theology journal), but thus far I have been enlivened by what I've read and the quality of engagement (positive and negative) with Barth's thought. The papers are offered by a host of international scholars, from across theological disciplines, both male and female, and are equally varied in t...