Luke Bretherton
Biographic Data
| ID | 257571 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luke Bretherton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luke |
| FAMILY NAME | Bretherton |
| SIGNATURE | BRETHERTON L |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4032-8188 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
On Conversion
This essay develops a moral and political theology of social change rooted in a theological account of conversion. Challenging both reactionary and progressive frameworks, it proposes an account of social change that is paradoxical, nonlinear, and eschatologically oriented. Conversion is presented as a dynamic, integrative process of personal, structural, and spiritual transformation. It reclaims conversion as involving both continuity and ruptur…
Usury, Debt, and the Ethics of Mutuality
This article examines the ambivalence of debt as a simultaneously moral and economic category. It argues that debt traverses two axes: existential and economic indebtedness, and debt as either mutuality or domination. Drawing on biblical prohibitions of usury, Jubilee legislation, medieval scholastic debates, and modern social contract theory, the article contends that the moral problem is not debt per se but its severance from covenantal relatio…
Anglican Political Theology
This essay develops a constructive account of the ways Anglicans have addressed political questions. The first section outlines the characteristic political rationality of Anglican political theology (APT). This provides a backdrop to a consideration of the relationship between three distinct yet interrelated phenomena—church, nation, and state—and how they were understood as together constituting a polity. The second half situates APT in the con…
A Primer in Christian Ethics
How does Christian belief and practice relate to living well amid the difficulties of everyday life and the catastrophes and injustices that afflict so many today? In his introduction to Christian ethics, Bretherton provides a new, constructive framework for addressing this question. Connecting the theory and practice of Christian moral thought to contemporary existential concerns, this book integrates classic approaches to the pursuit of wisdom …
Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness
This essay analyses three concerns that arise at the intersection of ethics and politics through situating the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly his conception of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism, in the context of debates in the British New Left and drawing parallels and connections between these debates and the work of C. L. R. James and Black Marxism. The first concern is the modern suspension of ethics in the name of p…
Political Theology and the Democratic Paradox
An Ecological Theology of Liberation
Christ and the Common Life
Political Theology, Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship
Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how ci…
Exorcising Democracy
The Axes of Debt
This is a preface to three essays on different aspects of ontological and economic debt as themes in religious ethics. It frames their contribution by arguing that debt is central to traditions of philosophical and religious ethics yet is woefully neglected as a thematic problem and problematic in contemporary iterations of these traditions. In order to situate debt as a central moral concern, it is argued that any consideration of debt must wres…
Hospitality as Holiness
We live amid increasing ethical plurality and fragmentation while at the same time more and more questions of moral gravity confront us. Some of these questions are new, such as those around human cloning and genetics. Other questions that were previously settled have re-emerged, such as those around the place of religion in politics. Responses to such questions are diverse, numerous and often vehemently contested. Hospitality as Holiness seeks t…
A Shared Future
In this timely and insightful book, Richard Wood and Brad Fulton examine how “faith-based” community organizing can help “exorcise” the three demons that harm American society today: “economic inequality,” “racial injustice,” and “policy paralysis” (1). The book builds on Wood’s prior studies of community organizing, and draws on a comprehensive survey of the 4,145 members participating in the 178 community organizing coalitions across the USA. T…
Political Agape
This interconnected series of thirteen essays explores how a Christian understanding of love can frame the conditions and possibilities of living in a pluralistic liberal democracy. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, entitled “Liberalism and Agape” is programmatic. Consisting of three essays, it defines and delineates “prophetic liberalism” (which in Jackson's lexicon is a synonym for “political agape”). Part II, entitled “Replies to C…
Democracy and the Criminal Justice System
Additional informationNotes on contributorsLuke BrethertonLuke Bretherton is Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. His latest book is Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship & the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2015). Correspondence to: Luke Bretherton, email: [email protected]
Resurrecting Democracy
Through a case study of community organizing in the global city of London and an examination of the legacy of Saul Alinsky around the world, this book develops a constructive account of the relationship between religious diversity, democratic citizenship, and economic and political accountability. Based on an in-depth, ethnographic study, Part I identifies and depicts a consociational, populist and post-secular vision of democratic citizenship by…
Resurrecting Democracy
Coming to Judgment
This essay theoretically frames the inter‐relationship between ecclesial and political life and suggests how the ethnographic study of this intersection might generate theological conceptualisations of both. It argues there is a dialectical relationship between conceptualisations of ecclesial and political life and that their proper study requires attention to practice in order to generate judgments on both. The key issue here is the kind of rati…
Alinsky and Augustine
The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad Based Organizing
This essay contends that broad-based community organizing is best framed as an extension and development of American populism. To make this link it is necessary to focus on how the ‘dean’ of community organising, Saul Alinsky, drew on and developed key aspects of American populism. The link between Alinsky and populism is conceptual, genealogical, and sociological and a taproot that community organizing shares with certain elements of the civil r…
“Love Your Enemies”
Through an analysis of the Scriptural treatment of usury, a constructive theological analysis of the question of the friend‐enemy distinction as a political category, its relationship to a Christian conception of universalism as determined by being in Christ, and the nature of faithful citizenship is forged. This essay argues that usury is a paradigmatic instance of the friend‐enemy distinction as defined by Carl Schmitt and as such is primarily …
Fast Food
Mass fast food pervades modern society. We here offer a critical theological appraisal of fast food and of the nexus of social values of which it is part. We assess its production and consumption within the doctrinal contexts of creation, fall and redemption, and identify tensions between fast food culture and theologically-formed approaches to food and eating. The continual availability of fast food, its homogeneity, and its dislocation from loc…
A Postsecular Politics? Inter-faith Relations as a Civic Practice
Much of the academic literature on religious dialogue, and the policy being formulated regarding inter-faith relations, lacks any scope for genuinely political relationships or any account of how inter-faith relations are affected by the market and the state. Abstracting accounts of inter-faith relations from broader accounts of political economy masks how the state and the market are key factors in establishing the conditions and possibilities f…
Sovereignty
Christianity and Contemporary Politics
A Postsecular Politics? Inter-faith Relations as a Civic Practice
Much of the academic literature on religious dialogue, and the policy being formulated regarding inter-faith relations, lacks any scope for genuinely political relationships or any account of how inter-faith relations are affected by the market and the state. Abstracting accounts of inter-faith relations from broader accounts of political economy masks how the state and the market are key factors in establishing the conditions and possibilities f…
The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad Based Organizing
This essay contends that broad-based community organizing is best framed as an extension and development of American populism. To make this link it is necessary to focus on how the ‘dean’ of community organising, Saul Alinsky, drew on and developed key aspects of American populism. The link between Alinsky and populism is conceptual, genealogical, and sociological and a taproot that community organizing shares with certain elements of the civil r…
Political Theology, Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship
Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how ci…
Fast Food
Mass fast food pervades modern society. We here offer a critical theological appraisal of fast food and of the nexus of social values of which it is part. We assess its production and consumption within the doctrinal contexts of creation, fall and redemption, and identify tensions between fast food culture and theologically-formed approaches to food and eating. The continual availability of fast food, its homogeneity, and its dislocation from loc…
The Duty of Care to Refugees, Christian Cosmopolitanism, and the Hallowing of Bare Life
There is a surprising absence of systematic theological reflection on what the church’s response to refugees should be and how its response relates to wider debates on the duty of care to refugees. This article situates theological concerns within wider philosophical debate on what the duty of care to refugees consists of. The first section critically reviews the debate on how liberal democracies should respond to refugees. The second section, fo…
A New Establishment? Theological Politics and the Emerging Shape of Church-State Relations
This paper examines the changing pattern of the relationship between religious communities and the state. It argues that the church, in the light of what is actually being offered to it by the state in terms of partnership, should, on the basis of its own frame of reference, refuse the terms and conditions of cooperation. The first section charts the developments which shape this emerging relationship since the early 1990s, most notably, the stre…
Living in Praise
Introduction
The article gives an account of Oliver O'Donovan's political theology, situating the articles in this special edition of Political Theology within this account. A central thesis of the article is that O'Donovan is seeking to defend a particular, theologically grounded understanding of the liberal polity. It begins by contrasting O'Donovan's conception of liberalism with that of other conceptions such as Rawls. The article goes on to identify the …
Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism
This book is part of emerging literature in American Christian political theology, a literature that plots the territory between the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and the mantle of Stanley Hauerwas. The central thesis of the book is that if John Rawls and other political liberals emphasize unity at the expense of the expression and valuation of difference, radical democratic and agonistic political theorists emphasize difference at the expense of an…
Sovereignty
Christianity and Contemporary Politics
Christianity and contemporary politics
Relations between religious and political spheres continue to stir passionate debates on both sides of the Atlantic. Through a combination of theological reflection and empirical case studies, Bretherton succeeds in offering timely and invaluable insights into these crucial issues facing 21 st century societies.: Explores the relationship between Christianity and contemporary politics through case studies of faith-based organizations, Christian p…
“Love Your Enemies”
Through an analysis of the Scriptural treatment of usury, a constructive theological analysis of the question of the friend‐enemy distinction as a political category, its relationship to a Christian conception of universalism as determined by being in Christ, and the nature of faithful citizenship is forged. This essay argues that usury is a paradigmatic instance of the friend‐enemy distinction as defined by Carl Schmitt and as such is primarily …
Fast Food
Mass fast food pervades modern society. We here offer a critical theological appraisal of fast food and of the nexus of social values of which it is part. We assess its production and consumption within the doctrinal contexts of creation, fall and redemption, and identify tensions between fast food culture and theologically-formed approaches to food and eating. The continual availability of fast food, its homogeneity, and its dislocation from loc…
A Postsecular Politics? Inter-faith Relations as a Civic Practice
Much of the academic literature on religious dialogue, and the policy being formulated regarding inter-faith relations, lacks any scope for genuinely political relationships or any account of how inter-faith relations are affected by the market and the state. Abstracting accounts of inter-faith relations from broader accounts of political economy masks how the state and the market are key factors in establishing the conditions and possibilities f…
Coming to Judgment
This essay theoretically frames the inter‐relationship between ecclesial and political life and suggests how the ethnographic study of this intersection might generate theological conceptualisations of both. It argues there is a dialectical relationship between conceptualisations of ecclesial and political life and that their proper study requires attention to practice in order to generate judgments on both. The key issue here is the kind of rati…
Alinsky and Augustine
The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad Based Organizing
This essay contends that broad-based community organizing is best framed as an extension and development of American populism. To make this link it is necessary to focus on how the ‘dean’ of community organising, Saul Alinsky, drew on and developed key aspects of American populism. The link between Alinsky and populism is conceptual, genealogical, and sociological and a taproot that community organizing shares with certain elements of the civil r…
Resurrecting Democracy
Through a case study of community organizing in the global city of London and an examination of the legacy of Saul Alinsky around the world, this book develops a constructive account of the relationship between religious diversity, democratic citizenship, and economic and political accountability. Based on an in-depth, ethnographic study, Part I identifies and depicts a consociational, populist and post-secular vision of democratic citizenship by…
Resurrecting Democracy
Democracy and the Criminal Justice System
Additional informationNotes on contributorsLuke BrethertonLuke Bretherton is Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. His latest book is Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship & the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2015). Correspondence to: Luke Bretherton, email: [email protected]
Political Agape
This interconnected series of thirteen essays explores how a Christian understanding of love can frame the conditions and possibilities of living in a pluralistic liberal democracy. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, entitled “Liberalism and Agape” is programmatic. Consisting of three essays, it defines and delineates “prophetic liberalism” (which in Jackson's lexicon is a synonym for “political agape”). Part II, entitled “Replies to C…
Hospitality as Holiness
We live amid increasing ethical plurality and fragmentation while at the same time more and more questions of moral gravity confront us. Some of these questions are new, such as those around human cloning and genetics. Other questions that were previously settled have re-emerged, such as those around the place of religion in politics. Responses to such questions are diverse, numerous and often vehemently contested. Hospitality as Holiness seeks t…
A Shared Future
In this timely and insightful book, Richard Wood and Brad Fulton examine how “faith-based” community organizing can help “exorcise” the three demons that harm American society today: “economic inequality,” “racial injustice,” and “policy paralysis” (1). The book builds on Wood’s prior studies of community organizing, and draws on a comprehensive survey of the 4,145 members participating in the 178 community organizing coalitions across the USA. T…
Exorcising Democracy
The Axes of Debt
This is a preface to three essays on different aspects of ontological and economic debt as themes in religious ethics. It frames their contribution by arguing that debt is central to traditions of philosophical and religious ethics yet is woefully neglected as a thematic problem and problematic in contemporary iterations of these traditions. In order to situate debt as a central moral concern, it is argued that any consideration of debt must wres…
Christ and the Common Life
Political Theology, Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship
Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how ci…
An Ecological Theology of Liberation
Politics (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Political science (22 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (14 works) · Theology (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Environmental ethics (11 works)