Abstract: To curb the spread of COVID-19, houses of worship in the State of New York were legally required to limit attendance at religious ceremonies. Two religious communities—the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Orthodox Jewish organization, Agudath Israel of America—asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
Abstract: The parable of the shrewd steward (Luke 16.1–9) is notoriously difficult to interpret. We encounter a figure who, when threatened with dismissal, dishonestly erases the debts of his master’s debtors. Yet, surprisingly, the master commends the steward. So, what exactly are we meant to admire in the steward?
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2022/2023 academic year. It includes a farewell from the Centre's founding director, Professor Nigel Biggar.
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2021/2022 academic year.
Abstract: In 1842, after her release from McLean Asylum in Boston, Elizabeth T. Stone (b.
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2020/2021 academic year.
Studies in Christian Ethics 33/2 (May 2020), Special Issue edited by Nigel Biggar and Matthew Lee Anderson: “Is Religious Freedom under Threat? Transatlantic Perspectives”. This comprises most of the proceedings of a conference held in 2018 under the auspices of the McDonald Centre.
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2019/2020 academic year.
Michael Lamb and Brian A. Williams edited a collection of essays that comprises the proceedings of a conference held in 2016 under the auspices of the McDonald Centre. The book, Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life, is published with Georgetown University Press.
The abstract reads as follows:
Ashley Moyse with co-editor John Fitzgerald (St Johns University, NY) have published Treating the Body in Medicine and Religion. It is an edited collection of essays that emerged from the Third Annual Conference in Medicine and Religions (2014).
The abstract reads as follow:
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2018/2019 academic year.
The December 2018 special issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics features essays reflecting on modern medicine at the centenary of Max Weber's "Science as vocation" (1917). The volume, edited by Matthew Vest (Ohio State University) and Ashley Moyse, includes contributions that emerged from the 2017 Annual Conference in Medicine and Religion.
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2017/2018 academic year.
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2016/2017 academic year.
This document contains details of the McDonald Centre's activities and achievements over the 2015/2016 academic year.
The May 2016 issue of Studies in Christian Ethics features contributions to a project undertaken focusing on the ‘pre-modern’ or ‘long’ traditions of political thought in Islam and Christianity.
The April 2016 issue of The Muslim World contains a selection of proceedings from a conference on Christian and Islamic political theology organised at the University of Cambridge in May 2014 by Prof Joshua Hordern and Dr Afifi al-Akiti.
The thought of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is often regarded as having caused a crisis for theology and religion because it sets the limits of knowledge to what can be derived from experience. In The Intolerable God, Christopher Insole challenges that assumption and argues that Kant believed in God but struggled intensely with theological questions.
On November 30, the McDonald Centre distributed a parliamentary briefing by Nigel Biggar to a number of MPs in advance of the anticipated vote by the House of Commons on whether or not Britain should participate in military action against ISIL in Syria.
A Special Issue of Studies in Christian Ethics gathers together contributions to the 2014 McDonald Centre conference on Nigel's Biggar's In Defence of War. It also features a set of responses from the author.
This document sets out the main activities of the McDonald Centre over the 2014/2015 academic year.
As a science and practice transcending metaphysical and ethical disagreements, ‘secular’ medicine should not exist. ‘Secularity’ should be understood in an Augustinian sense, not a secularist one: not as a space that is universally rational because it is religion-free, but as a forum for the negotiation of rival reasonings.
The attached report features activities undertaken by the Centre over the 2013/2014 academic year.
Is ethics about happiness? Aristotle thought so and for centuries Christians agreed, until utilitarianism raised worries about where this would lead. In this volume, Peter Singer, leading utilitarian philosopher and controversial defender of infanticide and euthanasia, addresses this question in conversation with Christian ethicists and secular utilitarians.
The McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life is a research institute at the University of Oxford.