My original studies were in the area of German and Russian language and literature at Merton College Oxford, followed by a DPhil at Wolfson College Oxford on the work of Paul Celan, a German Jewish poet who wrote remarkable poems about the Holocaust. Life has taken me to many different places, and I have had the opportunity to teach at universities in Germany, Russia, Italy, USA and China. I held the chair of Christian Doctrine at King's College London from 2004-2017, where I remain an Emeritus Professor. From 2017 I moved to a post in China, and from 2018-21, held a Senior International Research Chair in Science, Ethics, and Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China, Beijing. It was during this time in China that I was drawn to think more seriously about the interdisciplinary study of our current malaise as a species on planet earth. How can we re-stabilize ourselves as a planetary species under the kinds of exceptional pressures which afflict us today? I am currently arguing in a series of papers and talks that the key questions for humanity lie in the clash or coalescence of science and history. History points to change and to challenge: we have to bear widespread responsibility for how we live together on this planet. But science also has a key role to play in that it gives us secure knowledge. It is in the healthy integration of history as social change and science as knowledge that we can, as a species, potentially attain new levels of stability which can become the productive ground of our shared human future. This is a programme however that is still in its early stages. Unfortunately Enlightenment science was focused in the large-scale with its technologies and empires. It is only in recent decades that a really powerful understanding of the human from the perspective of neurobiology and human sociality has emerged. History would have dealt us a better hand if we had started with the small-scale with its strong sociality and only then moved to large scale science, with its deeply concerning technological outcomes (nuclear weapons; climate change; global inequality). Our times are dominated therefore by a far-reaching educational problem: we need to understand and be shaped by the deeply social dimensions of the human, as the sound basis of our self-understanding, before we apply our technologies - with their far reaching effects - to the fragile world around us. This is the problem that will not go away.
NEW ARTICLES
2021: Love as Belonging: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of the Human, in Paul Fiddes, ed., Love as Common Ground, Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., Chapter 14. ISBN 1793647801
2021: 'Cosmic Christianity', Chapter 32, Mary Ann Hinsdale and Steven Okey, eds., T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, 397-407.
2021: 'Science, Philosophy and the Authority of the Early Franciscan Summa Halensis: Learning from the Past for the sake of the Future', in Lydia Schumacher, ed., The Legacy of Early Franciscan Thought, De Gruyter, 373-97.
2020: 'Grace in Evolution', in Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustín Fuentes, eds., Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology. Dialogues in Humility, Wisdom and Grace, Routledge, Taylor and Francis: London and New York, 228-42.
2018: Confucianism in the Perspective of Global Science—A Review of 'Reconceptualizing Confucian Philosophy in the 21st Century'
Front. Philos. China 2018, 13(1): 150–163
DOI 10.3868/s030-007-018-0010-2
2021: Love as Belonging: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of the Human, in Paul Fiddes, ed., Love as Common Ground, Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., Chapter 14. ISBN 1793647801
2021: 'Cosmic Christianity', Chapter 32, Mary Ann Hinsdale and Steven Okey, eds., T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, 397-407.
2021: 'Science, Philosophy and the Authority of the Early Franciscan Summa Halensis: Learning from the Past for the sake of the Future', in Lydia Schumacher, ed., The Legacy of Early Franciscan Thought, De Gruyter, 373-97.
2020: 'Grace in Evolution', in Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustín Fuentes, eds., Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology. Dialogues in Humility, Wisdom and Grace, Routledge, Taylor and Francis: London and New York, 228-42.
2018: Confucianism in the Perspective of Global Science—A Review of 'Reconceptualizing Confucian Philosophy in the 21st Century'
Front. Philos. China 2018, 13(1): 150–163
DOI 10.3868/s030-007-018-0010-2
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