Renewing Christian intellectual life in the world's research universities
Yale University
Essential to any discussion of justice is the distinction between two fundamentally different forms of justice – call them first-order justice and second-order justice . First-order justice consists of justice in our ordinary interactions with each other: teachers and students treating each other ju…
Yale University
The word justice has grown more popular in schools of architecture within the last few years. It is normally paired with the word social ; and while there is much within that movement that the Christian can celebrate, it strikes me that the foundations underlying the construct of social justice are …
University of Notre Dame
I liked this a lot -- its tone is generous and nuanced, and spot on in its recognition that concerns for justice are not "value added" but rather intrinsic to human being in the world -- but for some reason I liked it much more the second time I read it (when on my first reading perhaps I was feelin…
University of Alberta
Justice: What follows are some stream of consciousness thoughts on Professor Wolterstorff’s brief: I like the idea of subdividing justice into first- and second-order types. It strikes me that our fundamental calling as Christians is to establish, in a very bottom-up rather than top-down way, God’s …
University of Wisconsin-Madison
In one sense, especially among young people, “justice” - by which they mean “social justice” - is au courant to be sure. And yet in my undergraduate embryonic development course I find students are ill-equipped to think about the broad implications of “justice” as it intersects with the human condit…
University of Queensland
I agree with the paper. On just relations being “pervasively violated” in the university: I find it quite disturbing the way universities (and some of my colleagues) exploit international students, postdocs, and visiting scholars. Some labs are like ``sweat shops’’. Adjunct faculty is another issue……
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
In science and engineering/technology education these days there is a renewed emphasis on Ethics. But most universities have little idea how to address the need in a way that relates the topic to the major interests of science and engineering students. There are experimental programs growing in diff…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Satellites tend to be expensive. How can the results of space based observation be made useful to all nations especially those who cannot afford them.
University of Hong Kong
Beethoven and the question of human freedom is not (as is often thought) about will and power (heroic and Promethean) but also about relations and therefore ‘first order’ justice. We could consider Beethoven’s humanism as an expression of ‘first order’ justice, even in something as seemingly simple …
Monash University
I’m interested in how one understands justice not on the level of individual relationships but at the level of whole societies, hence my interest in social contract theories.
University of Sheffield
Insofar as this argument depends on interpretations of texts from the Hebrew Bible and their contribution to ethics, this intersects with writing I have done on particular texts (in Genesis, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) and with my contention that there are significant impediments to Western thinkers unde…
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Saint Louis University
In recent decades, at least in certain philosophical circles, justice has lost some of its lustre as a virtue for establishing and sustaining good relationships in a society. In the view of some feminist philosophers, for example, ethics based on justice needs to be supplemented, or even supplanted,…
Auckland University of Technology
I found this Brief on Justice stimulating and timely. This is a core issue for us as Christians and scholars. I do however feel some discomfort – for reasons I am not yet clear on in myself - about grounding justice primarily in ‘rights’. This is not my area of expertise, but the rights discourse se…
University of Leicester
My research connects pretty directly with Nicholas Wolterstorff’s reflections, and with his published work on justice and rights, which I greatly appreciate. I’m preoccupied by the problem of injustice in Christian history:
University of Sydney
On Professor Woltersorff’s reflections on justice: I agree that the issue is very important, but I’m afraid that I see things differently. In my view the important distinction is not between his ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ justice, but between distributive justice and retributive justice. It is…
Jawaharlal Nehru University
There are many societies in the world, especially those that have been designated ‘tribal’, where social solidarity and individual rights are at the expense of each other. The societies that I have in mind are also Christian. A lack of social solidarity can mean at one level a loss of identity for t…
University of Calabar
The problem of justice at the first order level, both in the Old Testament Scripture and contemporary world can be traced to human natural propensity to be egocentric: How can this natural propensity be tempered so that the human person can see the external other as the extension of the self that is…
Bakke Graduate University
Prof. Wolsterstorff’s emphasis on justice touches pertinent questions which I raise in my research. Today there is a huge church structure with tentacles spread across the globe. There are issues of gender and racial discrimination, unequal treatments, exploitation, gaps between the clergy and the l…
University of Hong Kong
As a scholar studying the rule of law, the Justice Preview provides clear ideas on the concept of justice and rights and their inter-relationships. It confirms my understanding that the law should protect all the rights that a human person deserves to enjoy as a dignified being.
La Trobe University
The idea of justice underlies the study of law. As the preview identifies two fundamental forms of justice, first-order and second-order, there are also two essential notions of justice, procedural and substantial. My research on lawyers’ professional identity reveals lawyers’ general tendency to em…
The University of Queensland
The distinction between first and second order justice is important. I would suggest a further distinction however. The first order of justice is defined by reference to ‘interactions’. While actions are an important aspect, there is also the equally important, and perhaps even more fundamental, dim…
University of Hong Kong
My research on social and economic rights is closely related to social justice, as it looks at how resources should be fairly distributed in the society based on human rights norms. ‘Render to each what is his right’ can be applied to social and economic rights as well, as each person has a moral cl…
University of Melbourne
I found the Brief to be convincing. It affirms my view that we are confronted with justice issues in the micro and the macro events of our lives and our work. However, I find that justice understood as ‘rights’ can sometimes be too abstract. Disagreements as to what ‘rights’ or what ‘justice’ ought …
American Bar Foundation
The interactionist core to the preview’s treatment of justice resonates strongly with my sociological research, ranging from global lawmaking interactions inside international organizations to everyday relations among defendants, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, police in China’s justice system and its…
Universidad de La Sabana
As a commentary to Prof. Wolterstorff’s paper, I see a perfect alignment between the requirements of the first-order and second-order justice and my own commitment to promoting socially responsible business in Latin America, as well as my critical analysis on the jurisprudence of the Inter American …
University of Otago
The idea of first-order justice as predicated on the inherent excellence and dignity of persons resonates strongly with my current research into the notion of “sexual dignity”. I am also interested in collaborating with indigenous researchers to consider comparative dimensions of the dignity of pers…
Northwestern University
The relationship between individual and systemic (or social) conceptions of justice in the preview does connect with my research, as my work explores how what starts out as low-stakes individual claims for justice among narrow economic groups may sometimes bleed over into claims about threats to one…
Harvard Medical School
If being just in the first order is a virtue, it would seem relevant in mental health care – as a treatment goal for some individuals, perhaps as an ingredient in the process of therapy, and as a characteristic of a good therapist.
Columbia University
I am struck that the modern practice of medicine often challenges Wolterstorff’s treatment of justice (“rendering to each what is his or her right, or due”) in two key ways. First, the regnant principle in medicine is respect for autonomy, which means that treatment for patients often becomes mere w…
Harvard University School of Public Health
To what extent should forgiveness be considered a matter of public health and public policy? (VanderWeele, T.J. (2018). Is forgiveness a public health issue? American Journal of Public Health , 108:189-190.)
University of Nottingham
The Justice Preview that Wolterstoff outlines seems to fit intuitively with how we form understandings of interaction and justice. Some of my work examines how children understand fairness and I use stories to try to convey different scenarios to children. In some recent work it seems children have …
Brandeis University
This excellent discussion of justice grounded in rights, and rights being “what respect for worth requires,” closely links up with the equitable “distribution of [economic] benefits.”
University of Cambridge
One of the themes I trace in my work is the rise of what Professor Wolterstorff calls the ’Aristotelian’ notion of distributive justice in Anglo-American thought over the last century. I’d be interested in reflecting on what role Christian thinkers have played in shaping prevailing conceptions of ju…
Redeemer University
I appreciate very much Nick’s foundation of justice in relationships. This is, to me, a very Biblical picture. It also drives me into Scripture itself, searching after what a "right relationship" might actually be. How, after all, to understand the normative structure of a friendship, or a business …
University of British Columbia in Vancouver
1/ I used Wolterstorff’s work on justice a while back when I was giving a talk on the use of reading / literature and being a Christian. So this was a pleasure to read.
Australian National University
I’m very much looking forward to the fuller version. Two things came to mind when reading this two page version: I would be very interested to see Wolterstorff grapple with the global/international dimensions of justice - both with respect to the OT (e.g. Israel’s call to love the (often foreign) st…
Victoria University of Wellington
Professor Wolterstorff’s introductory pages on the meaning of justice and its connection to human dignity and rights is brilliantly clear and pertinent to my area of work, as well as to the wider field of scholarship. His distinction between first order and second order justice is very helpful, not …
University of Technology Sydney
J S Mills conception of society is that unless you harm others (in which case 2nd order comes in) the only thing that determines proper action is your unfettered freedom. I have criticized this framework.
University of Texas
The theme of the brief on human interaction at the core of acting justly connects with my work studying learning and teaching in different human populations. Largely these are NON-WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised, Rich, & Democratic) societies with varying levels of interactions with others ac…
University of Oxford
I found the preview very clear and helpful. Here are some connections with my current academic preoccupations: Is the desire for justice a fundamental human characteristic, and if so, what is its origin? How might a Christian understanding relate to those of evolutionary psychology and social constr…
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
The Preview evokes for me the significance that language (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English) plays in communication of shared, core ideas, such as the nuances of meaning in that English word and concept called “justice” or “righteousness”. I am intrigued by the OT meanings that associate justice with Go…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
Here in Colombia, the armed conflict has resulted in literally millions of documented human rights violations; the government has responded by making human rights a major part of the educational curriculum for the past generation. Rights discourse is pervasive, and generally in a "second order" fash…
Yale Divinity School
To what extent is what is owed to another determined by their membership in a particular natural kind, i.e., their humanity? And to what extent is it determined by particular features of that individual, or of particular social groups or institutions to which that individual belongs?
University of Edinburgh
It will be no news to my friend Nicholas Wolterstorff, I am afraid, that I have profound difficulties with his approach to the topic of justice, since our differences on the topic have in the past appeared in print. The following statements of the disagreement are no more than Summary headings:
University of Oxford
If justice is about ‘interactions between human beings’ then the ‘actors’ or the ‘agents’ are clearly important, opening up an interesting question: What virtues might be necessary to underwrite the ability to interact justly – honesty, humility, gratitude?
Yale University
Wolterstorff’s rights-based account of justice has significant bearing on the ethics of home-making and home-maintenance, particularly in a world where there are millions who have no house to call home, no land that will treat them as belonging, or highly insecure habitations. It pushes in the direc…
Yale University
How may Christian academics engage justice and rights in their scholarship and the academy? God’s love of justice recurs repeatedly in the Old Testament and it is integral to the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles. Consistent with this teaching, I distinguish between first order justice , where agen…
Kyoto University
I have often pondered on the issues that Nicholas Wolterstorff has lucidly raised during almost fifty years of working to reduce disaster risks. The key passage in Micah chapter 6 has always presented a powerful challenge for anyone working in the disaster field- how to balance the need for ‘doing j…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
This is a brief, speculative, and exploratory response from the perspective of a physicist to the understanding of justice proposed by Nicholas Wolterstorff in his Theology Brief for the Global Faculty Initiative. His key points may be summarized as follows.
University of Cambridge
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Theology Brief on ‘Justice and Rights’ offers an exceptionally rich and stimulating analysis of how Old and New Testament might shape a Christian approach to these topics. Prof. Wolterstorff argues, persuasively, that a strong emphasis on social (or systemic) justice not only…
Auckland University of Technology
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s stimulating Theology Brief on ‘Justice and Rights’ majors on justice as rendering persons their right or due in terms of their worth or dignity or excellence. He comments rightly that the Old Testament focuses on social or systemic injustice rather than on individual cases, a…
Bakke Graduate University
Professor Wolterstorff’s Theology Brief on Justice and Rights demonstrates deep Christian thinking on a very important subject. Not only does it reinforce the centrality of justice in both the Old and New Testaments, it also shows the nexus between justice and rights, and makes the pertinent point t…
University of Melbourne
Wolterstoff’s Brief on ‘Justice and Rights’ clarifies the central role of justice in the academy (writ large). I find his distinction between first and second order justice to be useful in organizing my own thinking on the matter. The Brief has provoked me to reflect on two aspects of academia which…
American Bar Foundation
The world confronts enormous problems that very often, perhaps always, require responses beyond the capacity of single national governments or states. Indeed, in my view, we can no longer think about the solution of any vexing problem of any magnitude entirely within the bounds of a single state. In…
The University of Queensland
In his Theology Brief on Justice and Rights , Professor Nicholas Wolterstorff has offered an account of justice that distinguishes between first order justice , in which individuals and institutions act justly in their everyday affairs, and second order justice , which concerns the laws, sanctions a…
University of Queensland
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s fascinating and helpful essay on justice and rights is thought-provoking in many respects. As a lawyer, I hardly need reminding, of course, of the centrality of justice in all that I do. Without what Wolterstorff calls second order justice, (that is, the laws, sanctions and s…
Harvard University School of Public Health
Public health has been defined “the art and science of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts of society” (Acheson, 1988; WHO). The term “public health” might thus concern the study of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health, or the ac…
Australian National University
I found the theology brief Justice and Rights very stimulating, in particular the attention paid to the relationship between justice and love, righteousness, and rights as action oriented. Each of these aspects provide a strong justification for orienting Christian scholarship towards research that …
The call for climate justice has come from many environmental campaigners in recent months, not least from the lips of Greta Thunberg and her young followers. It is less evident in the vocabulary of environmental economists, but a type of ‘justice’ is implicit in the analysis that economists present…
University of Leicester
Humans are storytelling animals, and our debates about justice involve debates about history. As Nicholas Wolterstorff observes in his theology brief, ‘Justice and Rights’, there are rival accounts of the genealogy of human rights. This is high stakes history, and hence we find philosophers, theolog…
The Australian National University
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Theology Brief on Justice clearly illustrates that the notion of justice pervades virtually every element of human existence. In contrast, my objective in this Disciplinary Brief is much more narrow and modest: to capture the trajectory of my evolving thinking concerning how …
Victoria University of Wellington
Professor Wolterstorff’s lucid and perceptive account of a Christian conception of justice and rights provides an excellent framework for locating the distinctive concerns of restorative justice theory and practice, as well as for helping navigate some of the current debates in the field, especially…
Australian National University
In his theology brief for the Faculty Initiative, Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about justice in the language of rights. Fair enough. He has done this to great effect in earlier work too. [ 1 ] Some, including myself, might like to see greater acknowledgement not only of the corollary relationship bet…
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
Prof. Nicholas Wolfterstorff has written an insightful and thoughtful theological brief (hereafter NWTB) on justice and rights . Any response to such rich, dense and evocative piece is mainly an expression of my gratitude for the gift of friendship afforded by the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI) pla…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
It initially felt like a bit of a misnomer to call what follows a “Disciplinary Brief,” since the ensuing text engages with Prof. Wolterstorff’s Brief, not in my capacity as a New Testament scholar, but from my experience working with victims of forced displacement in Colombia. Here at the Biblical …
Harvard University
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s theology brief on “ Justice and Rights ” offers a characteristically lucid distillation of some key themes from his wide-ranging work on justice as (in Ulpian’s classic definition), “rendering to each his right (or due).” [ 2 ] In particular, Wolterstorff argues convincingly,…
Pontifical University of St. Thomas (Angelicum)
Prof. Wolterstorff helpfully points out that justice is based on healthy and well-ordered relationships between persons. For Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian influenced by Aristotle and Augustine, such order emerges from natural human inclinations to seek happiness in virtuous and constructiv…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My research is on the design and development of large scale satellite architectures. Two examples relevant to this discussion are the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the current development of global space based systems to provide world wide internet access. There are several currently in develo…
University of Rosario
Wolterstorff’s aim of bringing to light and demanding attention to the role of justice in the academy should represent a fundamental commitment for all of us. This requires a constant effort to identify and fight against subtle forms of injustice, hidden behind academic practices or institutionalize…
Universidad Austral
In his Theology Brief Justice and Rights , Prof. Nicholas Wolterstorff indicates that first-order justice pertains to how agents engage each other, how they interact. This assertion is true; however, deep interpersonal relationships require more than mere justice. In my opinion, they can only develo…
Northwestern University
Law is the chief institution through which second-order justice is administered. We live in a liberal society where everything is permitted unless specifically prohibited. But Scripture tells us that we are fallen creatures. Lawmaking, therefore, must play a critical role in shaping second-order jus…
University of Otago
In his Theology Brief Justice and Rights , Professor Wolterstorff explores the idea of first-order justice from a Christian perspective, including the place of considerations of justice in disciplinary subject matter. Wolterstorff rejects the term “distributive justice” for the type of justice which…
Harvard Medical School
Justice may at first seem peripheral to the therapeutic enterprise, with its emphases on non-judgmental acceptance and individual growth. But first order justice is often central to the goals of treatment, the clinician’s approach, and the delivery of care.
Yale University
I found the twenty-six Disciplinary Briefs in response to my Theology Brief, “Justice and Rights,” perceptive, inspiring, and gratifying – and sometimes surprising. What I found perceptive and inspiring was the amazing variety of ways in which these scholars employ considerations of justice in their…
The importance of reflection on and of clarity about flourishing life — life that is worthy of our humanity, the true and good life — follows from the following observation about contemporary societies: “We have become experts in means but amateurs in ends.” [ 1 ] We have become “resource-oriented” …
Kyoto University
Volf, Croasman and McAnnally-Linz ask us to consider the essence of a ‘flourishing life’. For almost fifty years I have been preoccupied in teaching, research, writing and advocacy with the needs of people engulfed in disasters and how attitudes, policies and appropriate architecture can enable surv…
Yale University
Flourishing is a term not of theological but of vegetable origins: to flourish is, first of all, to bloom, blossom, flower. Perhaps the earthiness of this etymology can serve to counter the airiness of philosophical and theological abstraction. After all, the necessary precondition for flourishing i…
University of Notre Dame
I am grateful to Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz for their Flourishing Preview effort to get the ball rolling on this most important and complex subject, most especially for their recognition of human flourishing as a normative (hence teleological) ideal, and their emphases u…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My spirit was "strangely warmed" by this preview, a result that I confess much formal theology fails to provoke. Thank you. There is deep resonance here for me. One connection to my work in explaining science to a wider public is that I find often among both secular and religious communities an extr…
University of Oxford
In 2021 Oxford UP will publish Human Flourishing: Scientific insight and spiritual wisdom in uncertain times , by Andrew Briggs and Michael J. Reiss. In the book, we identify three dimensions of flourishing as material, relational, and transcendent:
University of Alberta
I enjoyed reading Volf et al.’s thought-provoking brief. I must confess though that my initial reaction came with some reservations. I resonate with the Stoics’ idea of flourishing - virtuous living - but am (or was) inclined to be suspicious of tying flourishing too closely to circumstances (sounds…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My scholarship is on changes in the space enterprise and how to make it more broadly accessible and cost effective. It would primarily affect “life going well” in that when the space enterprise changes many more people overall at the world will be able to innovate in the new space enterprise. Like m…
AGH University of Science and Technology
Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord , and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its frui…
Yale University
I think the Flourishing preview is superb. I am surprised that, when I wrote Justice: Rights and Wrongs , I did not see that, in addition to the agential and circumstantial dimensions of flourishing, which I took note of, there is the emotional dimension. It now seems to me blindingly obvious.
Monash University
On flourishing in relation to topics I work on: How does the social contract, as metaphor and narrative, help to make visible and clarify the agential and circumstantial prerequisites of flourishing? How can it obscure those same prerequisites? (Christopher Watkin, French Philosophy Today: New Figur…
University of Calabar
Harnessing and managing the resources that promote flourishing cannot be totally separated from people’s ideas and worldviews. In this respect, how can cultivation of critical thinking address the socioeconomic disabilities that undermine the promotion of flourishing life in the global south?
University of Rosario
I read the Theology brief on human flourishing after visiting a family of indigenous healers in my country, Colombia – a family that has become my own. The Taita’s (shaman) grandchildren, 7 and 4 years old, were mourning the absence of their mother, who had to go away for a treatment. Instead of gri…
University of Melbourne
This is a provocative brief and I thank the authors for it. In particular, I appreciate the recognition of the dimension of the emotional plane. I note my reactions briefly below.
La Trobe University
I like the connection between “righteousness” and a flourishing life. The idea of “righteousness” has permeated my research on Hong Kong, from the inquiries of universal human rights, the motivations behind lawyers’ political activism, and the basis of public trust in courts. It takes on particular …
University of Otago
The Flourishing Preview connects with my research on sexual dignity. Framing sexual violence as an assault on dignity allows for exploration of all three dimensions of flourishing as impacted by rape – for example, agency is overruled by the aggressor’s disregard for consent; this moral wrong can re…
American Bar Foundation
I find most evocative the three-dimensional unpacking of “flourishing” in the sense of (1) its value for a more systematic theological and ethical approach to the scholarly frontiers on which I seek to work, and (2) for understanding aspects of the academic life, the academic practices and instituti…
Columbia University
This brief describes well how medicine has gone astray: "experts in means but amateurs in ends.” We doctors have come to focus far too much on patients feeling well, while ignoring both society’s responsibility in ameliorating adverse circumstances (see Bradley & Taylor’s The American Health Care Pa…
University of Toronto
I am a pediatric surgeon and a researcher. As a surgeon-scientist, I have not been thinking so much about “flourishing” as we live in our new pandemic reality. I am mostly focused on the treatment of and research into congenital disorders that impair breathing in newborns. In the process, I provide …
Harvard Medical School
I found the Flourishing preview helpful, and would like to ask, as a psychiatrist interested in the relief of emotional and existential distress, where would the authors locate a sense of meaning and purpose (an element in Tyler VanderWeele’s Flourishing Measure)? While clearly related to emotions, …
Harvard University School of Public Health
(1) While I would wholeheartedly agree with the statement that "setting the definition of flourishing cannot be a task for the empirical sciences", I think this also potentially misses the important role of the empirical sciences not only in understanding the means to flourishing, but also the actua…
Auckland University of Technology
Thanks to these authors for addressing such a core question of human life, and therefore also a central issue for Christian reflection. ‘What should life ideally be like?’ is a pivotal matter for consideration by all of us. I offer several thoughts in response:
University of Oxford
The three-part conception of flourishing (agential, circumstantial and emotional) is very helpful in reflecting on the approaches to human flourishing that are part of an ongoing discussion in economics and related disciplines. More specifically, the issue of ‘flourishing’ or ‘welfare’ has a long hi…
Brandeis University
This is an excellent and very helpful perspective on flourishing. Stating that the empirical sciences cannot take on the task of defining flourishing is crucial. Broadly speaking, economics allows that concept to be defined by the individual. However, economics can contribute to understanding the au…
University of Oxford
Many people, like myself, “get” things from metaphors and images. Flourishing bears the image of flower. The Bible sometimes talks of ripe corn and bearing fruit, but it oftentimes also talks about flourishing, regardless of fruit, from the flowers on the field that bloom today and tomorrow are gone…
Australian National University
My disciplinary area is armed conflict and largescale political violence, with a focus on prevention and protection of civilian populations. Flourishing is a concept that does not feature in this area of study, despite efforts among scholars in this field to advance global cooperation and standards …
University of Oxford
1. On politics and flourishing: I think the nearest general social surveys get to flourishing is ‘life satisfaction’, which is measured in social surveys, but not in political surveys. In the latter, we ask about satisfaction with democracy, but the measurement of all this is highly complex. We don’…
Victoria University of Wellington
Thank you to the authors for this brilliantly clear analysis of a Christian approach to human flourishing, which is surely the most fundamental question underlying everything we aspire to do in life, both personally and politically. There is little to disagree with in the analysis – that flourishing…
University of Technology Sydney
The schema would be recognizable by my economics colleagues as they reflect on their own experience, but it is not easily formalizable in one of their models. This is a criticism of economic models, rather than the framework.
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
My first impression of the Flourishing preview is one of awe as to its density and clarity. It provokes me to raise two cross-cultural hermeneutical questions about framing its thesis by using the specific language/text in the brief (theological, philosophical, and that of Marcus, Marx, Mond). First…
University of Otago
I welcome the clarification of the three dimensions of flourishing provided in the preview. Each is clearly important, not in isolation, as the preview makes clear, but in combination. The preview suggests all kinds of connections with wider biblical/theological themes. As suggested, for instance, b…
University of Edinburgh
The concern to identify a normative concept of flourishing is admirable. There could be more connection made between “flourishing” and the traditional theological discussions of beatitudo, usually rendered “happiness”, sometimes “blessedness”. Such a connection could have the effect of widening the …
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
In my work with victims of forced displacement due to violence in Colombia, the concept of “holistic human flourishing” serves as a key organizing principle. Our holistic focus has broken down the facets of human flourishing in spiritual, economic, social, political, pedagogical, and psychological t…
University of Oxford
This is an extremely clear and helpful approach to conceptualising flourishing as threefold – agential, circumstantial, emotional. For some years now the relationship between freedom and flourishing has been a particular research interest of mine and my thinking can be mapped onto this conceptualisa…
Harvard University School of Public Health
While the Scriptures do not make direct reference to “flourishing,” related notions of shalom, blessedness, eternal life, and abundant life convey a rich and nuanced understanding of flourishing. Subsequent theological development has likewise provided an understanding of flourishing both in this li…
University of Oxford
In a Christian vision of reality, human beings are born into an environment that God has already created. We exercise moral and creative freedom in a context that is given to us.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Thank you for a hint of fascinating and insightful ideas relating justice and the created order of the natural world. I respond with outlines of some personal affirmations and contrasts, keyed to subsections.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
I am deeply and fundamentally in agreement with the argument. I would like to know as an engineer who does research how it guides me with respect to the choices of research, in particular, research on weapons and what classes of weapons. Is all weapons research acceptable if it helps sustain the cre…
Technical University of Darmstadt
I like the text, and I have a comment concerning the remark on the laws of physics and quantum chance: pure chance that depends on nothing would not help with "freedom" in the sense we humans understand it. What is essential is that chance is contextual, and that there are top-down influences. We mu…
University of Hong Kong
Music is a kind of cosmic natural law – at least in the ancient world. Both the Confucian and Pythagorean traditions posited music as a harmonious mathematical order that was simultaneously scientific, aesthetic and moral; and Pythagorean music theory was then adapted and incorporated in the Christi…
Saint Louis University
In the history of the Christian intellectual tradition, the account by Thomas Aquinas of the moral life, the virtues, and other such things, is very different from the account sketched in the Preview. Aquinas’s approach to the moral life emphasizes love, second-personal relations with the deity, and…
University of Melbourne
While many critics have argued that the world is becoming increasingly secular yet, in many of the major conflict zones in the world, religion is at the centre. As the West supposedly becomes more secular it is increasingly difficult for us to understand this. Whereas, in the past, radical elements …
University of Sheffield
First, I note the way that Prof Biggar discusses how the created order leads on to some propositions about the moral order as thought provoking and helpful. It is, however, androcentric. The focus is entirely on human beings, and in its current form does not attend to the wide realm of the created o…
Yale University
Nigel Biggar’s theology-brief preview, “Created Order,” is an excellent brief statement of the Christian understanding of the created order, along with some helpful suggestions concerning the implications of that understanding for the work of scholars. I affirm everything he says.
University of Hong Kong
The natural moral law is often viewed as the foundation or building block of the common law legal tradition which originated from England. Values like fairness, justice, equality, the rule of law, and respect for individual rights and liberties permeate the rules of common law and equity. These valu…
American Bar Foundation
I am most grateful to Prof Biggar for this lucid and compact Preview on God’s created physical and moral orders, especially insofar as it touches on law, politics and society—the nexus of my own research and writing. I have four questions.
Harvard University School of Public Health
To what extent, and in what ways, can one argue for the basic human goods and the propositions of natural law that follow from a Christian understanding of the created order to effectively persuade those who are not themselves Christian?
Harvard Medical School
What I find most intriguing in Created Order is the idea that goods (e.g., “friendship with God, personal integrity, just relationships, the experience of beauty, and creativity”) precede moral laws, which serve them. This has at least two liberating implications for me as a psychiatrist. One is tha…
University of Oxford
This is excellent, and highly readable. My only comment is that, in the section on moral law and international relations, a recognition might be in order that some respected and respectable thinkers in the tradition of political realism (including Reinhold Niebuhr, a protestant theologian) have a tr…
Brandeis University
Regarding international relations, Biggar notes that "even where there are no contracts between different peoples—where there is no international law—moral law still obtains." There is an interesting example of this in economic development, particularly among those passionate about solving global po…
Auckland University of Technology
Nigel Biggar’s is a fine statement of the actuality and character of created order, and its relation to moral order. His stress on the pervasiveness of morality through creation, and of the way of life which this implies for politics, international relations, and the academy, is winning and timely.
University of Oxford
The exposition concentrates on just one implication of created order - that is, moral order with implications for ethics generally and more specifically political order. For that I found it excellent, and the applications in the last three sections more than compensated for the fairly abstract reaso…
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
Does the difference between Old Testament monotheism and New Testament trinitarianism affect how we think about created order? More particularly, does it affect our understanding of what kind of community is best aligned with the created order? I’m asking neither about the relationship between OT an…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
Since my own work focuses on New Testament ethics, in both descriptive and prescriptive senses (i.e., what are the ethical convictions of New Testament authors and how should they shape Christian ethics today), this brief—sketching out some of the lines that run between the created order and the mor…
University of Otago
How are we to conceive and articulate the relation between the attributes of God and the attributes of creation? Biggar observes that biblical tradition affirms the oneness of God which is to say first, that ‘there is one good God unrivalled by any evil opponent’, and second, that ‘God is internally…
University of Edinburgh
I am delighted to see Nigel exploring these themes, which run parallel to much of my own work in the last two decades. With his general approach I am in the strongest sympathy, and in raising three questions I hope simply to tease out some of the underlying logic that a two-page summary inevitably g…
University of Oxford
This essay first observes the pejorative connotation of ‘order’ in contemporary Western culture, before proceeding to explain the Christian concept of created order and how it at once legitimates human orders and provides the ground on which to criticise them. The following topics are addressed: in …
Nigel Biggar (2022) argues that there is a created order in the world, but then humans, due to their sinful nature, have degraded and distorted that order.
Yale University
My own perspective on this topic arises from my primary work at the intersection of literature and religion. This does not mean I am disinterested in the kind of broader philosophical and theological work Biggar undertakes in this ‘brief’ – indeed, the opposite is the case, including within my conce…
Yale University
A prominent theme in Professor Biggar’s essay “Order” is that of embodied goodness – that is, of the goodness possessed by God and by things of divine and human creation. There are some writers who hold that there is no embodied goodness, no objective worth or praiseworthiness in things. Things have…
University of Navarra
Nigel Biggar’s theological brief ‘Order’ is inspiring for natural sciences on many grounds. In this disciplinary note, I would like to focus on the link between the objective order of nature and our subjective understanding thereof —an assumption that, according to Prof. Biggar, “is basic to the nat…
Auckland University of Technology
Nigel Biggar has made a fine statement of the actuality and character of created order, and the way it relates to moral order. His stress on the pervasiveness of morality through creation, and of the way of life which this implies for politics, international relations, and the academy, is both winni…
American Bar Foundation
Nigel Biggar’s Theology Brief on Created Order opens up a rich vein of inquiries for a sociologist of legal change. Biggar writes of an objective and rational moral order ordained by God. He juxtaposes this normative order with varieties of human orders—social, legal and political. This impels conve…
University of Hong Kong
In the Theology Brief on Order, Professor Nigel Biggar made a comparison between God’s Moral Order and Human Order. On the one hand, God’s moral order is a “divinely created order of values, and the moral principles and rules that it generates.” It is a guide to human behaviour, and provides “a fram…
Harvard University School of Public Health
In this short essay, I would like to offer some comments on the relation of the created order, and Nigel Biggar’s reflections on the created order (Biggar, 2022), to the discipline of public health. I will structure my comments around three propositions.
University of Oxford
In his theology brief on Order Nigel Biggar shows that, while positive law is man-made or posited, there is no human order without law; that, as Christians, we see the law in the light of revelation, sometimes but not always placing us at odds with those who do not contemplate the law in a similar p…
The market economy is an example of a human order in civil society which arises from the desire and willingness of economic actors to trade with each other in goods, services, and in factors of production such as the land, labour and capital that are utilised to produce those goods and services. The…
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
I find Prof. Biggar’s “Order” essay enlightening and evocative as it relates to my cross-cultural field of Pauline and Confucian studies. [ 1 ] Biggar’s thesis that, “Modern Western culture warms to freedom and shies away from order... Different histories, however, produce different biases,” is invi…
University of Cambridge
The created order provides the starting framework not only for the moral order, but also for the possibility of science. And as with the moral order, key aspects of the created order were observed and formalised in parallel with Biblical revelation and insights. For example, the Pythagorean passion …
University of Bonn
My academic work as a Catholic practical theologian consists, among other things, in rethinking religious education from a theological perspective. What are the “theologoumena” we have at our disposal to critically reframe the “order” of contemporary religious education (RE)? What really contributes…
University of Hong Kong
Nigel Biggar begins his theological brief by pitting freedom and order: ‘Modern Western culture warms to freedom and shies away from order. Whereas ‘freedom’ connotes liberation, exhilaration, and vitality, ‘order’ connotes oppression, constraint, and sterility.’ Modern freedom seems to define itsel…
University of Melbourne
As I read Nigel Biggar’s brief on “Order” a couple of areas are of interest and speak to me of the work that I have been doing over the last few years in collegiate education as Principal of Emmanuel College at the University of Queensland and Master of Queen’s College within the University of Melbo…
University College London
The two sections that spoke to me, especially reading them together, were: (i) the penultimate paragraph on the prophetic role of the Christian academic through the exercise of the Christian epistemic virtues; and (ii) the section on functional hierarchies marked by a fraternal ethos.
The University of Queensland
Professor Nigel Biggar has written a wonderful theology brief on the topic of Order. My comments are in the nature of supplementary thoughts that build upon the admirable theological foundation he has constructed.
Harvard Medical School
This discussion of the moral order is germane to my current work on the psychiatrist’s role in the patient’s moral life. While value neutrality on the part of a therapist is generally recognized to be a myth, explicit discussion of the moral dimension of clinical work is uncommon. This stems in part…
University of Oxford
My Theology Brief on ‘Order’ has, it seems, been fertile in generating numerous lines of thought in the minds of colleagues working in a wide range of academic disciplines. I observe, reassured, that none of them take strong exception to what I wrote, even though I was trespassing on disciplinary te…
Yale Divinity School
The virtues are salient for issues in every academic field and for all elements of the academic life. Often when we think of morality, we think first of rules or principles defining good action and codes of conduct for behavior. These require people capable of putting them into practice. Principles …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
This is a thoughtful preview. In my own scholarship based on science and engineering, much seems very certain such as the fact that the earth is a prolate spheroid whose gravitational potential is measured and modeled. This allows us to very accurately calculate orbits for satellites. Here the truth…
University of Guadalajara
The understanding of virtue ethics in terms of agents acting according to their moral character, reminded me a lot what was proposed by theologian Stanley Hauerwas as an important component of his confessional postmodernism. Moreover, as a Christian scientist, constantly seeking to give meaning to m…
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Excessive concern of professors for promptly moving forward in their academic careers and for obtaining funds for research are currently damaging the very essence of the university. Indeed, nowadays professors have less time to interact in fruitful discussions, show little willingness to collaborate…
University of Hong Kong
Today’s researchers in the sciences face pressures in a “publish or perish” research environment. In pursuit of rankings or other key performance indicators set out by meta-institutions, the university administration passes these pressures to professors and research supervisors to generate data and …
University of Melbourne
I related most directly to her discussion in the context of my work as a public policy economist. Here I regularly bump up against the limits of purely technical analysis and reach for (primarily) the cardinal virtues in making a decision, for example, about the setting of interest rates or minimum …
University of Bonn
The virtues approach of colleague Herdt reminds us of important elements in the reflection on moral behavior and ethical decision-making. One of them is “human flourishing”. This should be the ultimate horizon for every kind of social and political action, regardless of the worldview or religious ba…
Yale University
In his essay “Religion and Literature” (1935), T.S. Eliot famously (some would say infamously ) asserts, “Though we may read literature for pleasure, … this reading never affects a sort of special sense; it affects us as entire human beings; it affects our moral and religious existence.” He later ad…
University of Melbourne
The short article on virtues resonates with me as I head up a Residential University College where our mission is to provide pastorally sensitive academic support for our students. Personally, the paper challenges me to think how I model Christian virtues to my staff and students and how I can call …
Brunel University
I found Professor Herdt’s brief very stimulating, especially as it attempts to connect the issues of virtue and institutions. I will reflect upon this relation adding some postcolonial concerns to it, and developing my comments from the interconnections between key issues such as: technique; social …
Auckland University of Technology
This is a wonderfully compressed piece of writing, encapsulating so much about the virtues in its brief compass, and making me eager to see the full exposition that will follow. Full thanks to the author.
University of Navarra
First, human beings are capable of ethical habits, i.e., stable dispositions allowing for excellent actions. In that regard, human beings share with other natural systems an autonomy through which they act over their environment but do this in a human-specific way, namely, developing human habits by…
Yale University
From some of the responses to my own Theology Brief on justice, it became clear to me that a significant gap in what I have written about justice is that I have paid no attention to the virtue of being just ; I have focused all my attention on acting justly. But in the absence of the virtue of being…
The University of Queensland
In her essay on The Virtues , Professor Herdt offers a warm and engaging account of the nature and importance of moral character in Christian ethics. In this short comment, I offer a brief exploration of one of the important observations with which she begins her essay.
American Bar Foundation
I am very grateful for Jennifer Herdt’s Preview on the virtues. It brings theological insights to my work in ways I hadn’t previously considered. I have two questions that reach to my research.
La Trobe University
Courage and justice, two of the cardinal virtues that Prof Herdt identified, can be used to describe those ordinary citizens and community leaders who risked their individual liberty in defending political liberalism in many authoritarian or transitional societies. These two virtues are perhaps mutu…
University of Hong Kong
Legal issues often involve resolving moral dilemmas. Law has its limitations, discretionary or grey areas. The extent to which just and fair decisions can be made depends not only on how good and comprehensive the law is, but also on how the legal personnel interpret and practice the law and how the…
Washington University
Virtues as I understand them must be cultivated and practiced through particularized communities and institutions. Professor Herdt rightly claims that “virtues reach to ways the academy itself is structured.” But what are those virtues, and how do we know? The intellectual virtues are indeed relevan…
University College London
The whole issue of the role and maintenance of virtue in the collective life of universities, both amongst staff and students, is currently a very live topic of conversation amongst institutional leaders. But the virtues that perhaps require most attention are those forming part of practical wisdom …
University of Otago
The framing of virtue ethics as a holistic view of persons flourishing in community resonated with me. I have recently established a mindfulness society, aimed at supporting lawyers, including legal academics, in cultivating mindfulness – clear and present awareness of current experience. Mindfulnes…
Columbia University
Dr. Herdt has provided an excellent rudimentary overview of the virtues. In my particular field of memory and cognitive psychology, the intellectual virtues indeed deserve greater attention. I would like to suggest that the cultivation of some virtues (e.g., prudence ) may operate through the intell…
Harvard Medical School
As an academic psychiatrist, I am interested in exploring the relevance of the virtues to both the character of the good psychiatrist and to the cultivation of needed virtues in our patients. To this end, I recently edited The Virtues in Psychiatric Practice (Oxford University Press, 2022) , which c…
University of Oxford
I agree virtues are very important for a flourishing research culture in which both science and people flourish. I would welcome greater emphasis on the role of the Spirit transforming us and our own inability to live the virtuous life in our own strength.
Harvard University School of Public Health
Professor Herdt describes some of why the virtues are so important in thinking about what constitutes a flourishing life. A challenging question concerns how to foster the virtues. Christian theologies of course offer accounts of transformation by the Spirit, by God’s love, by following Christ’s exa…
University of Oxford
The humanist in me cannot but welcome a focus on virtue, although the word “virtue” occurs only four times in the New Testament (Moulton and Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament , London 1929). The most likely reason is that the NT de-emphasizes human merit and emphasizes divine grace…
Victoria University of Wellington
Professor Herdt provides a wonderfully lucid overview of the virtues and virtue ethics and I look forward to the fuller account in due course. The topic seems more relevant than ever in our so-called “post-truth age”.
Brandeis University
I have two responses to Jennifer Herdt’s stimulating Preview on the virtues. One speaks to the academic life, the other to my discipline of economics.
University of Oxford
This is a very informative and stimulating outline of the argument, and I look forward to the full version to follow, which may address some of the following comments and queries.
Harvard University
I enjoyed reading Prof. Herdt’s preview of her forthcoming Theological Brief on the Virtues, and particularly appreciated the way she connects the virtues to human flourishing. In the full Brief, I would be interested in seeing some engagement by Prof. Herdt with the empirical evidence for the relat…
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
I appreciate Prof. Herdt’s theoretical and practical considerations on the life of virtues. Her inspiring work regarding the pagan-Christian sources in western classical traditions on virtue ethics encourages me to explore the interplay of philosophical and religious virtue traditions in other parts…
University of Edinburgh
Jennifer Herdt’s statement is an excellently focused statement of the traditional presentation of the virtues in theological discussion. In putting one or two questions to her, one is putting them to the tradition she has carefully sustained and developed.
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
As a New Testament scholar who works in the area of Christian wealth ethics, I agree heartily with Prof. Herdt’s construal of Christian virtues as both infused and cultivated . The component of infusion does, to my mind, reflect Pauline theology as well as, e.g., Jeremiah 31. So also, the emphasis o…
Yale Divinity School
How can reflection on the virtues help to shape the life of Christian discipleship? And how can we embody the virtues as scholars and in the life of the university? In this essay, I explain how the virtues enable us to move beyond a narrow focus on dos and don’ts; virtues form character and enable p…
University of Melbourne
Central banks are charged with maintaining price stability. Strictly speaking, if prices were stable, they would neither rise nor fall. In practice, prices rising slowly but predictably are less damaging to the economy than prices falling at any rate. So the practical equivalent of price stability i…
Jennifer Herdt’s Theology Brief on The Virtues reflects on the value of virtue ethics for Christians, the breadth of sources from which virtues may be derived, and the challenges that they raise. Among the virtues discussed by Herdt, the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love are relevan…
Yale University
To respond to Jennifer Herdt’s compelling plea to restore consideration of virtue and character formation to academic discourse and practice, I argue that literature can play a crucial role in this undertaking. I argue further, however, that it often does so in ways that complicate our understanding…
Yale University
My career has been that of a professor of philosophy. Jennifer Herdt’s fine essay, “The Virtues,” has led me to reflect on the virtues essential to the flourishing of the philosophy classroom, virtues that I have tried over the years to cultivate in my students and virtues that I have myself tried t…
American Bar Foundation
Since 2005 I have been engaged in empirical research on struggles for basic legal freedoms in China. At the intersection of sociology, law and politics, this research has ranged across many of China’s cities and provinces. It has included hundreds of interviews, analysis of media and online material…
University of Otago
In her Theology Brief The Virtues , Professor Herdt explores the idea of the virtues of social practices and institutions. Just as the church and its varied practices can be conducive to the development and sustenance of virtues, so too we can consider whether institutions support the virtues of tho…
University of Hong Kong
Legal issues often involve the resolution of moral dilemmas. Law has its limitations, its areas of discretion or ambiguity. The extent to which just and fair decisions can be made depends not only on how good and comprehensive the law is, but also on how legal professionals interpret and practice th…
Harvard Medical School
Dr. Herdt’s beautiful discussion of the virtues clarifies and resonates with my own recent thinking as a Christian academic psychiatrist. Virtues have been historically neglected within psychiatric practice. Reasons include concerns about scientific objectivity, realistic expectations, and therapeut…
Harvard University School of Public Health
Questions of virtue do not routinely arise in public health contexts. Supposed connections between virtue and health have sometimes come under criticism for effectively “blaming the victim” for poor health (Sloan, 2011; Willen, 2022). While acknowledging this concern, in this commentary, I will sugg…
We suspect that most economists, both academic and professional, if asked to comment on the role of the virtues in economics, would look somewhat surprised to be asked, as the virtues do not figure in the standard frameworks of economics as currently practiced. The exception might be those whose tra…
The Australian National University
The global humanitarian system is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise aimed at expressing universal solidarity and meeting human need. Herdt’s Theology Brief on the role of virtues prompted a number of reflections about this system, the various people who donate to it, work for it, and receive goods f…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
I work with an organization called Scholar Leaders (SL) that cultivates theological leaders and Christian seminaries from around the globe. Three aspects of Prof. Herdt’s essay struck chords with the work of Scholar Leaders, aspects which correspond to our desire to support the ecclesial, inter-reli…
University of Edinburgh
There was a time in the last century when expansive claims were made for “virtue”. Dissatisfied with a modern ethics that had reduced morality to decision-making, moralists in search of a wider understanding of human morality looked back to Aristotle, and paid special attention to his treatment of v…
University of Hong Kong
Beyond intellectual virtues or skills that give the capacity for the attainment of knowledge, there are some obvious moral virtues for scientists as they relate to their data, to the community of fellow practitioners, and to funders and community stakeholders.
The University of Sydney Business School
In the section of her Theology Brief on ‘Virtues Enable Flourishing’, Professor Herdt writes that “The virtuous person does not act well instrumentally… [they] seek to act well because acting well is good, not merely because it is good for me .”
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
Given the increasingly diverse and globalized world we live in, Herdt’s inspiring work on the pagan and Christian sources of classical traditions in virtue ethics has encouraged me to explore and uncover ethical and religious virtue traditions in the worlds of the ancient Near East and China. Herdt’…
Yale Divinity School
The various responses to the Theology Brief on the Virtues, whether in the form of Preview Responses, Disciplinary Briefs, or Disciplinary Notes, make for wonderfully stimulating reading. I am grateful to all who took the time to read and respond to the Brief or the Preview (and sometimes both!), an…
University of Edinburgh
The command of love which forms the centrepiece of Jesus’ moral teaching (Mt. 22: 37-40 and parallels) was elicited by a rabbinic discussion that sought to identify a unifying interpretative principle for the requirements of the Torah as a whole. That love “fulfils” the law means four things: ( a ) …
Kyoto University
Just imagine…you are a twenty-year old asylum seeker, a migrant from a Middle Eastern Country, warm but unsafe. You are now a lonely stranger in Helsinki where the winter snow and the winds blowing in from the sea are hostile. You live in a youth hostel, do not know anybody and life is exceedingly h…
University of Oxford
Much of science research involves a complex web of relationships, both among scientists within a research group in a lab and with collaborators in labs in other institutions around the world. The discussion of the Sovereignty of Love reminded me of a conversation I had with a Chinese Professor when …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My discipline is engineering (aerospace engineering in particular). Engineering at its best is about creating products, systems, and architectures which are responsive to a society’s needs and that improve the human condition. Examples are the provision of clean water, the electrification of society…
University of Rosario
In his Preview on The Sovereignty of Love, Professor O’Donovan delineates an argument in favour of the long-standing claim that love is a way of knowing the world. This claim opposes a dominant view of knowledge, particularly strong since the scientific revolution, according to which the only valid …
University of Melbourne
Professor O’Donovan’s work speaks to me in the context of being the Master of an academic residential collegiate community at the University of Melbourne founded by the Methodist Church and still associated with the wider Christian community through its affiliation with the Uniting Church in Austral…
University of Otago
“Personal loves, given priority in Jesus’ love-commands, are open to reciprocity and mutual communion.” This line from the Love Preview resonates with longstanding feminist critiques of the classical conception of consent to sexual activity as something that can effectively (whether due to doctrinal…
American Bar Foundation
Professor O’Donovan’s Preview opens up a new line of approach to my research on struggles for basic legal freedoms in 21 st Century China. Re-reading my field notes through the lens of love reveals a finely textured mosaic of love’s manifestations. These are apparent in the lives of China’s leading …
University of Hong Kong
Professor Oliver O’Donovan’s Theology Brief Preview on ‘The Sovereignty of Love’ inspires me to reflect on the tension between love and law. Professor O’Donovan explores the notion of love conceived as will and the love-command as a fulfilment of the law. Indeed, ‘love must be sincere’ (Romans 12:9a…
University of Queensland
Oliver O’Donovan’s thought-provoking reflection on the sovereignty of love demonstrates just how many dimensions of love need to be considered. He does not particularly focus on romantic love, or love that finds its fulfilment in marriage; but of course so much of what he writes has application to i…
Harvard Medical School
I appreciate the chance to read Professor O’Donovan’s Preview. As a psychiatrist who authored a chapter on love in a book on the virtues in psychiatric practice (Peteet 2022), I see loving as central to living well, and helping patients to love more effectively as a potentially important focus of tr…
Harvard University School of Public Health
I thank Professor O’Donovan for his reflections on love and its relation to the will, knowledge, the virtues, and justice; and I appreciate his many succinct insights.
University of Virginia
As expected, I find Professor O’Donovan’s brief essay rich and profound, and I look forward to the longer, more developed essay. I find especially helpful his linking of love to knowledge and his suggestive treatment of the differentiation of loving practices, e.g., that love sometimes requires fide…
University of Oxford
In my field of international relations, Raymond Aron has famously called states “cold monsters” (following Nietzsche; Hobbesian Leviathans and Behemoths are lurking in the background). Monsters are proverbially loveless creatures, and I personally find the idea rather unappealing. Yet, my observatio…
American Bar Foundation
As I seek to grasp Professor O’Donovan’s profound thought on love, I realize how little I have previously considered the ways its varieties of expression might penetrate scholarship, scholarly lives, and institutions. I begin my own efforts to grapple with this enhanced vision by raising questions a…
At the core of economic analysis is the idea that there are gains from trade between economic agents, such as individuals, businesses, states. The simplest formulation has two agents with different endowments of goods, who by trading with each other can attain bundles of goods that meet their ‘needs…
University of Technology Sydney
The topic of love is a dividing line between theology and economics. One might say theology is deeply concerned with love - its manifestations, divine and human; its definitions; its teloi. However, economics does not even have it as an explicit category.
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
Love is beleaguered in a world that is increasingly polarizing and violent. Can we even begin to talk about “love” that can mend the rifts caused by “irreconcilable” opinions about “love”? In times like these, I appreciate the refreshing and succinct insights of Prof. O’Donovan’s Preview on Love (he…
Yale Divinity School
I am grateful for Oliver O’Donovan’s Preview on “The Sovereignty of Love,” which so compactly distills a lifetime of study and reflection on the special place of love in the Christian life. Anticipating the full brief, I hope that Professor O’Donovan will address there the puzzle of commanded love, …
Yale University
In my years as a professor of philosophy, I often had students come to my office with questions about the course they were taking from me. They didn’t understand something I said in my last lecture, they expressed disappointment over the grade I had given them on their essay and asked for advice abo…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
Professor O’Donovan’s provocative Preview raises questions in relation to my own work. As I work with adherents of other religions, or with atheists, it is my perception that genuine love is operative in their way of being and acting (in varying degrees, naturally). Consequently, I have reservations…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
I feel uncertain about Professor O’Donovan’s provocative statement that “the relation of love to justice…does not follow the pattern of the other virtues,” according to which love is the “golden chain” that connects other virtues, which are themselves “governed by special norms.” If the image of the…
University of Edinburgh
Jesus famously taught (Matthew 22: 37–40 and parallels) that the first command of the law was Deuteronomy 6:4, “You shall love Yhwh your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength” and the second Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. All obligations, moral and rel…
University of Oxford
In ' Love and Natural Sciences ' Ian Hutchinson presents an excellent application of Oliver O'Donovans's Theology Brief ' The Sovereignty of Love ' to those working in the natural sciences. It prompted me to go beyond theoretical considerations and think how this should work out in practice within m…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Oliver O'Donovan's theology brief "The Sovereignty of Love" [ 1 ] springs from Jesus' two great commandments (Matt 22:37-40): to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets", says Jesus. O'Donovan's…
University of Oxford
At first sight “love” and “natural science” seem an incongruous pairing. Love is an aspect of human experience, in particular of personal relationship with another person or thing. The word love is then applied to a wide variety of entities, including inanimate things such as landscapes, sunsets, pa…
University of Queensland
I was both surprised and challenged by O’Donovan’s argument that love should be primary for a Christian scholar. My prior perspective was that universities are primarily about thinking. Integrity, both intellectual and moral, should be the main characteristic of Christian scholars. This includes int…
University of Oxford
Oliver O’Donovan offers an inspiring and illuminating account of the supremacy of love in Christian moral thinking. He clarifies how Jesus’ teaching about the greatest commandment in the law offers a principle that guides and interprets all of life. ‘To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever’ was said…
University of Oxford
An earlier version of this Brief was presented at the Global Faculty Initiative Faculty Retreat on Disciplinary Encounters with the Theology of Love at Yarnton Manor, Oxford, 8 May 2026.
University of Oxford
Love is an I know not what That comes I know not whence And slips inside, I know not how And wounds I know not where […]
University of Rosario
One of the central theses of Professor O’Donovan’s Theology Brief titled The Sovereignty of Love is that there is a strong and intimate connection between love and knowledge. This idea, which has a long history in Western thought, implies different interrelated affirmations: Firstly, there is a kind…
University of Oxford
In considering how briefly to respond to Professor O’Donovan’s Brief from the perspective of my own discipline – that of historical research and writing – a constructive point of convergence is with part of the working definition that he offers: love as ‘ directive attention to the good of persons’ …
University of Otago
The intelligibility of biblical law is derived from love, in that ‘love orients all moral direction in Scripture’, writes Professor O’Donovan . [ 1 ] The love-command directs us to love fellow-creatures as an indirect way of loving the invisible God, the neighbour presenting us with a reflection of …
University of Queensland
Oliver O’Donovan’s magisterial paper on the sovereignty of love discusses a variety of dimensions of love. A core argument is that love is more than a feeling. It requires action:
Harvard Medical School
Love is central to human flourishing, and therefore a central concern of psychiatry. Helping patients to love more effectively can become an important focus of treatment when life events challenge a patient, when the patient has lost perspective on love, when a clinician sees a need for love as a he…
Harvard University School of Public Health
As O’Donovan (2026) rightly observes in his Theology Brief on “The Sovereignty of Love,” the Christian tradition puts love at the center of its ethics, and at the heart of what it means for humans to flourish. Jesus taught that the greatest commandment was to love God and to love one’s neighbor, and…
Pontificia Universidad Católica
Oliver O'Donovan's account of the sovereignty of love offers a powerful corrective to conceptions of love as mere sentiment or benevolent motive. Love, on his account, is "an affective and directive attention to a good": it interprets moral norms, belongs within practical reason, and gives direction…
At the core of economic analysis is the idea that there are gains from trade between economic agents, such as individuals, businesses, states. The simplest formulation has two agents with different endowments of goods, who by trading with each other can attain bundles of goods that satisfy them bett…
University of Technology Sydney
An earlier version of this Brief was presented as the opening address of an Oxford Faculty Workshop on “The Sovereignty of Love” hosted by GFI in partnership with the Lanier Theological Library, Yarnton Manor, 6 June 2025.
University of Oxford
The heart of Oliver O'Donovan's paper is an Augustinian view of the “order of love”. Though he does not come to state this overtly until over half way through, its influence has been pervasive from the beginning. In his own words:
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
Love is beleaguered in a world filled with polarization and violence. Jealousy, bigotry, hubris, and resentful revenge are traits Paul described in 1 Corinthians 13:4–5 as signs of a troubled Roman society, and they are appearing again in today’s headlines. Siloed and binary thinking divides people …
University of Oxford
At the GFI round table on the insightful theological brief The Sovereignty of Love , much of the discussion turned on O'Donovan's mobilisation of the Augustinian idea of the orders of love. The panellists were by no means sure that O'Donovan's formulation that we should love things for the sake of p…
University of Oxford
O'Donovan's Brief opens with the love-command as the summary of all moral direction and concludes with a double warning against abstract norms of knowledge and action on the one hand, and against “an impractical idea of love confined to attitude and feelings” on the other. Between these poles, the B…
University of Oxford
I thank Professor O’Donovan for such a rich and stimulating Theology Brief. I focus my remarks on one aspect that is mentioned only briefly – love for the stranger. I think it is especially important that we think more on this in an age where there is so much fear and antagonism directed towards ‘th…
As O’Donovan states, both love and justice have been deemed the supreme virtue at various points in the philosophical tradition. How can these virtues be integrated with each other when the role of governing the other virtues is attributed to both? An answer is suggested in the writings of the Churc…
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