Michael J. Leyden

The video I mentioned in my last post: my interview with Professor Tom Greggs on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (once again with my questions cut out!). This is a YouTube clip from a much bigger project being undertaken by Rev. Dr Tim Hull at St John's College Nottingham UK. Click here for more info.

This is part two of an interview I did with Professor David Clough on Karl Barth. Here David tackles Barth's theological development and the issues in Barth's theology after the famous Anselm book, "Fides Quaerens Intellectum". Part one can also be viewed here . Watch this space for another interview, this time with Professor Tom Greggs ( soon to be of Aberdeen University ) on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This interview is part of the same project as the Barth clips, and in available via St John's College Nottingham .

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...