Rev Canon Professor Luke Bretherton

Biography:

Prior to Oxford Bretherton was the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology and Senior Fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Before joining Duke in 2012, he was Reader in Theology & Politics and Convener of the Faith & Public Policy Forum at King's College London. Alongside his scholarly work, he writes in the media on topics related to religion and politics, has worked with a variety of faith-based NGOs, mission agencies, and churches around the world, and has been actively involved over many years in forms of grassroots democratic politics, both in the UK and the US. He also hosts the Listen, Organize, Act! podcast which focuses on the history and contemporary practice of community organizing and the role religion plays in democracy. Specific issues addressed in his work include debt, fair trade, environmental justice, racism, humanitarianism, the treatment of refugees, interfaith relations, euthanasia, secularism, nationalism, church-state relations, and the provision of social welfare.

Research Interests:

Primary areas of research, supervision, and teaching are Christian ethics, political theology, the intellectual and social history of Christian moral and political thought, missiology, interfaith relations, practices of social, political, and economic witness, and the relationship between Christianity and capitalism as well as between Christianity and democracy. A key part of the work is making connections between these foci and social scientific, critical, and other ways of analysing contemporary moral and political issues and questions.

Research Centres & Projects:

Director, McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life

Editorships:

Editorial board, Modern Theology; Editorial board, Journal of Religious Ethics

Links:

https://oxford.academia.edu/LukeBretherton

Listen, Organize, Act! Podcast which focuses on community organizing, religion, and democratic politics

Select Publications & Research Outputs:

Books

  • What is Political Theology? Co-authored with anthropologist Valentina Napolitano and religious studies and Black studies scholar Vincent Lloyd (Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
  • A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
  • Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019).
  • Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  • Christianity & Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing.
  • Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Routledge, 2006)

Articles

  • Christianity and Democracy,’ St Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology, on-line (2024)
  • Theology and Social Science,’ The Modern Theologians, eds., Rachel Muers and Ashley Cocksworth, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024).
  • Interviewed by New York Times columnist, David Brooks, for Comment Magazine (Oct. 2022) on Christian humanism.
  • ‘Political Theology and Qualitative Research,’ The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Theology and Qualitative Research, eds, Pete Ward & Knut Tveitereid (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2022).
  • Political Theology, radical democracy, and virtue ethics; Or Alasdair MacIntyre and the paradoxes of a revolutionary consciousness,’ Political Theology, special issue 22.7 (2021), 627-649.
  • ‘Christian humanism, redivivus,’ in T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, ed., Rubén Rosario Rodríguez (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)
  • ‘The Axes of Debt: A Preface to Three Essays,’ Journal of Religious Ethics 46.2 (2018), 207-216. With Devin Singh.