MY BACKGROUND
Welcome to my homepage. I hope you find some things of interest here (click for CV and Publications). There’s not much to tell you about my background, except that I grew up in South Wales, with an English mother and a Welsh father (I speak Welsh fluently but as a second language). Life has taken me to many different places, and I have had the opportunity to teach at different Universities in German, Russian and Italian. This might seem a greater achievement than it actually is since my early background was in Modern Languages and Literature at Oxford. I wrote my DPhil at Oxford on the work of Paul Celan, a German Jewish poet who wrote remarkable poems about the Holocaust. I later found that it is Theology which really grips me. I taught for ten years in the University of Wales, which included two memorable periods as Visiting Scholar at UVA in Charlottesville, Virginia. My early work was on medieval mysticism (especially Meister Eckhart) and Celtic Christianity, combining my interest in language, texts and theology. A new departure came with the publication of A Theology of Compassion in 2000. This was a theological and scriptural study of compassion. Early Jewish texts understand compassion to be the site of disclosure of the Creator and of the world. This was followed in 2004 by The Creativity of God which took the world, again from scriptural and theological sources as its theme. A great discovery for me in researching this book was how extensive the influence of cosmology was in classical Christianity and how little understood that cosmology is today.
KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
In 2004, I moved to King's College London, where I followed Colin Gunton as Professor of Christian Doctrine. This was a great privilege as Colin had really put King's on the map in terms of Systematic Theology. King’s remains a wonderful place to teach and research Theology, and the Doctrine Chair is right at the centre of what we do. There are currently over ten staff in Theology at King’s, including six Chairs, representing different Church traditions, which makes it one of the best resourced environments for advanced theological research in the world. We are very fortunate that we all work really well together. There also seems to be something special about King's postgraduates in Theology too. They often come from very varied backgrounds and have considerable experience in different walks of life. Working with these students in their research interests is a very special experience. With these resources, we have been able to develop a whole series of fascinating workshops and seminars. There is sometimes so much interaction at King's that we all wonder whether we can keep up! A further source of creativity is our long history of association with the Churches at King’s and with a range of other institutions at the heart of London (including most recently the National Gallery). This allows Theology to find its right focus at the centre of modern life. I believe that Transformation Theology and Social Transformation, which are the two active collaborative research projects in which I am currently centrally involved are both very much the product of this particular environment.