This paper was originally given as a response to Joan Lockwood O’Donovan's 2024 Recollection Lecture, delivered at Pusey House, Oxford. It invites reflection on Christology, eschatology, and mission in O’Donovan's vindication of the public authority of the Church of England.

The paper expounds the centrality of the church's public authority to the project of constructing a radical theological criticism of the Western tradition of liberal natural rights and a theological alternative to it. Key to this centrality is the profound dialectical tension between the church's two interdependent modes of public authority: namely, its essential authority of evangelical proclamation and its alien authority of coercive jurisdiction. The authority of the church's proclamatory practices belongs to Christ's direct, saving rule through the Spirit among his people, whereas the authority of the church's jurisdictional practices belong to Christ's indirect, preserving rule through the Spirit over sinful society, so that the latter is teleologically ordered to the former. The liberal political tradition of natural rights in its modern phase denies publicity to (i.e., privatizes) both modes of the church's authority and inverts the proper theological ordering of juridical to proclamatory authority in the church as well as throughout the institutions and associations of civil society. The public theology of the English Reformation both identifies these deficiencies and contributes to rectifying them.

This concluding paper addresses some important themes in Joan Lockwood O’Donovan's English Public Theology , not considered in other papers in this special issue, but which take us to the heart of her contribution to public theology. The focus is upon how an evangelical community may be emancipated, especially in its desires and affections, from what O’Donovan sees as the distorting, even enslaving effects of liberalism's preoccupation with juridical subjective rights. It proceeds by taking up O’Donovan's challenge that theologians should be more alert to the meaning of what is ‘public’. In this regard, it considers a striking feature of her account of evangelical public authority, which is her use of the term ‘command’, when applied to the beliefs, affections, understanding and behaviour of those commanded. The connection between the church's commands and those made by a wide variety of social institutions and influences is considered. The significance of the distinction between jurisdictional and evangelical commanding is also examined in order to develop an account of evangelical affective culture and its practical consequences. In particular, this practical focus includes consideration of Eric Gregory's invitation to remark on what difference O’Donovan's approach makes with respect to the discussion of Christian nationalism.

In their article, ‘Vicious Trauma: Race, Bodies and the Confounding of Virtue Ethics’, Terese Lysaught and Cory Mitchell argue that the academic virtue ethics discourse has largely ignored non-White voices, failing to take embodiment seriously. This article attempts to address their concern by proposing a virtue ethics framework that emphasizes the positive role embodiment plays in virtue maintenance and development. Drawing from both ancient and modern virtue ethical discourse, I modify Plato's tripartite soul paradigm to elevate the body's significance. I also employ insights from ante-Nicene Christian theologians, who recognized the moral goodness of the body, to articulate how the body can both hinder and contribute to virtue. The framework is applied to analyze Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane and examine racial trauma. This article argues that a robust theory of embodiment within virtue ethics can address issues like race and trauma, which have been neglected due to the lack of attention to embodiment. By integrating philosophical and theological resources, I aim to provide a nuanced understanding of how the body influences virtue formation and how external forces acting on the body shape virtue development.

Friendship is a virtue that holds significant potential as a method of Christian virtue formation. The article begins with Aristotle's concept of character friendship found in the Nicomachean Ethics as an integral part of his overall account of moral goodness. The Aristotelian account serves as a valuable foundation as there are many elements that can be adopted in a Christian approach. Next the article engages the uniquely Christian understanding of friendship and how it transforms Aristotle's understanding beginning with the example of Jesus in the Gospels. Reflections on friendship in Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman are highlighted to respond to the criticism that Christian thinkers denigrated friendship between the early fifth and mid-nineteenth century. Finally, the article shows how Christian ethics might reach a critical synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian insights on friendship in order to propose friendship as a valuable method of Christian virtue formation.

Television feels like an inescapable part of daily life. From billboards to buses to pop-up ads strewn throughout the internet to that go-to conversation question, ‘Have you watched [insert name of TV show] lately?’, TV is our very present companion on this earthly pilgrimage. But where does it fit within the life of Christian discipleship? This article will explore this issue by providing a description of TV within the theological context of the lordless powers, specifically, as the base of operation for a lordless power. While this is not an entirely new insight, accounts that connect TV to the lordless powers tend to skim over the theological bedrock required to make such a claim. The challenge of this article is to provide a thicker account of the lordless activity operative in the everyday activity of watching TV, a task pursued through extended engagements with Karl Barth's theology of the lordless powers and Albert Borgmann's philosophy of technology.

This article considers Barth's views on punishment as demonstrated both in his work on the atonement and through his ministry with incarcerated persons. I examine his history in ministry with those in prison, his visits to prisons in the US, and conversations with prison chaplains, along with his discussion of God's punishment of the ‘one great sinner’. Though a forensic framing of Barth's account of the atonement has dominated interpretations of his soteriology, the apocalyptic elements in Barth's account of Christ's work provide a promising direction for those seeking an approach to atonement that does not rely on courtrooms as sites of justice or punishment as a path to reconciliation. Given Barth's interest in prisons and concern for the prisoner, I examine his views on punishment alongside current prison abolition movements. I find Barth's commitment to a useful function of punishment to be at odds with the abolitionist perspective, but I also see resources in his theology that are compatible with the abolitionist imagination. I read the apocalyptic pattern in Barth's theology as resonant with the spirit of abolition through a focus on accountability over individual guilt and the promise of radical change, that is the end of an old system and the imaginative creation of something entirely new.

The dramatic British election of 1945 and an unlikely best-seller on economic philosophy provides the setting for a respectful conversation, rather than an acrimonious debate, between two long-time colleagues of the London School of Economics, the economic theorist F.A. Hayek and the economic historian R.H. Tawney. Their dialogue highlights divergent approaches to key moral issues embedded in economic thought, including the nature of freedom, the role of the state, and the reasons for poverty. The article examines the way in which Christianity underpins Tawney's approach to these questions and how, for Hayek, a network of secular beliefs performs a parallel function as the foundation of his world view and activism. The second part of the article considers the relevance of these events and conversation from 75 years ago for the ongoing dialogue between Christian ethics and economics.