Celia E. Deane-Drummond - Böcker

There are two driving questions informing this book. The first is where does our moral life come from? It presupposes that considering morality broadly is inadequate. Instead, different aspects need to be teased apart. It is not sufficient to assume that different virtues are bolted onto a vicious animality, red in tooth and claw. Nature and culture have interlaced histories. By weaving in evolutionary theories and debates on the evolution of compassion, justice and wisdom, it showa a richer account of who we are as moral agents. The second driving question concerns our relationships with animals. Deane-Drummond argues for a complex community-based multispecies approach. Hence, rather than extending rights, a more radical approach is a holistic multispecies framework for moral action. This need not weaken individual responsibility. She intends not to develop a manual of practice, but rather to build towards an alternative philosophically informed approach to theological ethics, including animal ethics. The theological thread weaving through this account is wisdom. Wisdom has many different levels, and in the broadest sense is connected with the flow of life understood in its interconnectedness and sociality. It is profoundly theological and practical. In naming the project the evolution of wisdom Deane-Drummond makes a statement about where wisdom may have come from and its future orientation. But justice, compassion and conscience are not far behind, especially in so far as they are relevant to both individual decision-making and institutions.

Why do humans who seem to be exemplars of virtue also have the capacity to act in atrocious ways? What are the roots of tendencies for sin and evil? A popular assumption is that it is our animalistic natures that are responsible for human immorality and sin, while our moral nature curtails and contains such tendencies through human powers of freedom and higher reason. This book challenges such assumptions as being far too simplistic. Through a careful engagement with evolutionary and psychological literature, Celia Deane-Drummond argues that tendencies towards vice are, more often than not, distortions of the very virtues that are capable of making us good. After beginning with Augustine's classic theory of original sin, the book probes the philosophical implications of sin's origins in dialogue with the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Different vices are treated in both individual and collective settings in keeping with a multispecies approach. Areas covered include selfishness, pride, violence, anger, injustice, greed, envy, gluttony, deception, lying, lust, despair, anxiety, and sloth. The work of Thomas Aquinas helps to illuminate and clarify much of this discussion on vice, including those vices which are more distinctive for human persons in community with other beings. Such an approach amounts to a search for the shadow side of human nature, shadow sophia. Facing that shadow is part of a fuller understanding of what makes us human and thus this book is a contribution to both theological anthropology and theological ethics.

This is the third and final volume of a three-part work exploring the evolution of wisdom, understood broadly to include both practical wisdom and humanity's capacity to connect with the divine. The first volume was primarily concerned with interspecies relationships and the core moral capacities of justice, compassion, and practical wisdom, arguing in the light of that analysis for the need for a different theoretical framing of the moral life, based on evolutionary, theological, and philosophical arguments. The second volume considered the darker side of human nature, the tendency for different vices and their evolutionary trajectories. This third volume focuses on humanity's capacity to reach for the transcendent within an evolutionary context and in dialogue with those moral capabilities associated with the spiritual life, including the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, alongside gratitude, wisdom, humility, grace, and joy. The evolution of compassion is now situated within the context of the development of humanity's capacity for mercy. This book weaves together and interrogates philosophical concepts, especially those inspired by the work of Paul Ricoeur, alongside moral psychology and the classic moral theology of the virtues in the work of Thomas Aquinas, considered in dialogue with the work of other theologians such as Karl Rahner. This volume is, therefore, concerned with the fundamental question of what difference the spiritual life makes to human capacities to do good in the light of what we know about our evolutionary past and current psychological theories, while also providing a critique of the latter through theological and philosophical epistemologies. It is relevant to the broader question of how change for the good might be possible in human behaviour, especially in the light of the serious global eco-social challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

Designed as a basic text, for students and non-specialists, in science and religion, this book brings together current advances in both areas in a fruitful dialogue and interchange. Deane-Drummond uses key illustrative examples from contemporary genetic science, ecology and Gaia as a way of probing present practice. She engages readers in theological reflection on recent advances in the biosciences in a way that shows the challenge of modern biological science to theology. As a book designed to promote engagement in dialogue, this one considers the particular contribution of theology to the debate, through an exploration of the philosophical and social basis for current biological science, including the questions raised by contemporary feminists. Specifically, it argues that the theological tradition of wisdom provides critical resources for theological reflection on biological science and emerging ethical issues. Moreover, the book argues that the wisdom motif finds key resources from a range of theological traditions, thus becoming a rich basis for ecumenical dialogue on issues of current social concern.

Creaturely Theology is a ground-breaking scholarly collection of essays that maps out the agenda for the future study of the theology of the non-human and the post-human. A wide range of first-rate contributors show that theological reflection on non-human animals and related issues are an important though hitherto neglected part of the agenda of Christian theology and related disciplines. The book offers a genuine interdisciplinary conversation between theologians, philosophers and scientists and will be a standard text on the theology of non-human animals for years to come. Contributors include: Esther D. Reed (Exeter), Rachel Muers (Leeds), Stephen Clark (Liverpool), Neil Messer (Lampeter), Peter Scott (Manchester), Michael Northcott (Edinburgh), Christopher Southgate (Exeter)

Peter Manley Scott offers a theological and ethical reading of our present situation. Due to the vigour of its re-engineering of the world by its technologies, western society has entered into a postnatural condition in which standard divisions between the natural and the artificial are no longer convincing. This postnatural development is liberating - both theologically and politically. Scott develops an 'anthropology' that does not repeat Christianity's history of anthropocentrism but instead criticises it by exploring the mutual entanglement of animals, humans and other creatures. Deeply disrespectful of traditional centres of power, his ethical critiques of 'pioneering' technologies expose their anti-social and anti-ecological tendencies and identify possible paths of oppositional political action. This is ethical theology at its best: deeply informed by theological tradition, immersed in contemporary political-technological problematics in radically oppositional ways, and yet fiercely hopeful of a good outcome for animals - human and non-human - and other life in history.