The event, entitled Why Religion Deserves a Place in Secular Medicine, was organized by the Veritas Forum and respondents included the Reverend Dan Hall of the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor Warren Kinghorn of Duke University Medical School. The full text of the lecture is available here.

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon USA.

No living philosopher is most controversial than Peter Singer. In this book, Charlie Camosy, who is currently Visiting Fellow at the McDonald Centre, offers a critical, but constructive reading of Singer’s arguments on animal rights, euthanasia, poverty, and abortion. He finds important and surprising areas of common ground between Singer and Christian ethics, but he also does not hold back in pressing Singer where his views are lacking. The book is a model of the McDonald Centre’s vision that Christians can in public engage generously, rigorously, and candidly, even with views that they do not share.

From the back cover:

Interaction between Peter Singer and Christian ethics, to the extent that it has happened at all, has been unproductive and often antagonistic. Singer sees himself as leading a ‘Copernican Revolution’ against a sanctity of life ethic, while many Christians associate his work with a ‘culture of death.’ Charles Camosy shows that this polarized understanding of the two positions is a mistake. While their conclusions about abortion and euthanasia may differ, there is surprising overlap in Christian and Singerite arguments, and disagreements are interesting and fruitful. Furthermore, it turns out that Christians and Singerites can even make common cause, for instance in matters such as global poverty and the dignity of non-human animals. Peter Singer and Christian ethics are far closer than almost anyone has imagined, and this book is valuable to those who are interested in fresh thinking about the relationship between religious and secular ethics.

More information is available from Cambridge University Press and Facebook. Camosy is a regular contributor to the blog, Catholic Moral Theology.

Patriotism?
Loyalty, Identity and Cohesion in a Religiously and Culturally Differentiated Nation

The conference is organized by Manchester’s Lincoln Theological Institute, as part of their ongoing series, Reconsidering Civil Society. By asking how national loyalty might be understood in a religiously plural nation, the conference aims to achieve greater clarity over whether or not the revivification of Patriotism is warranted and what might be new in a revitalised Patriotism.

The conference (including lunch) is free, but registration is required. To register or to view the full programme, visit the conference website.

• 24 April: Against Human Rights
  Professor John Milbank, Professor of Religion & Ethics, University of Nottingham
• 1 May: Religious Liberty: From Trent to Vatican II
  Professor Thomas Pink, King’s College London
• 8 May: Freedom and Slavery: The Case of Deacon Sam Sharpe
  Dr Delroy Reid Salmon, Regent’s Park College, Oxford
• 15 May: Law and Gospel: On the Duty to Order the World
  Dr Esther Reed, Head of Theology & Religion, University of Exeter
• 22 May: Law, Religion & Public Reasoning
  Dr Jonathan Chaplin, Director, Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, Cambridge
• 29 May: Numbers and Lines
  Dr Catherine Pickstock, Reader in Philosophy & Theology, Cambridge
• 7 June (Thursday): Canon Law as an International Legal Framework
  Dr Robert Ombres OP, Blackfriars, Oxford
• 12 June: Two Way Translation: A Test Case for Religious Intervention
  Professor Jeremy Waldron, Chichele Professor of Social & Political Theory, Oxford

This exciting event will include some of today’s top Christian scholars, such as Sarah Coakley, Jean Bethke Elshtain, David Ford, Paul Griffiths, Richard Hays, David Hempton, Mark Noll, Miroslav Volf, John Witte, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. All of these participants are Distinguished McDonald Scholars from eight of the most prominent universities in the UK and USA.

Perry will address the conference section on law, for law students or those interested in law, which focuses on the relation of Christian ethics and human rights.

The language of rights is pervasive in legal thought and beyond; rights have been called the principal counter in political discourse (John Finnis), and the moral lingua franca of the modern age (Michael Perry). This precipitates several questions that we will explore in this seminar. Can the moral beliefs and practice of the Christian life be a proper way of giving content to the analytical structure of rights? Or, as Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested, do lawyers and judges displace clergy and theologians when rights are the foundation for how we conceive of and adjudicate questions of justice in a pluralistic democracy? Does Christianity provide a needed account for the basis of rights, or a challenge to the fundamental assumptions of rights discourse? We will hold a round-table discussion with Oxford faculty members and postgraduate lawyers to explore the relationship between contemporary legal rights discourse and the Christian worldview.

For more information or to register, visit the website for Developing a Christian Mind.

A downloadable version, without the audience Q&A, is available free from  as part of Keble College’s podcast series.

• to understand the nature and effects of states
• to develop an intellectual agenda within which the study of the state in an era of globalisation might most productively be placed
• to assess the strengths and weaknesses – and the benefits and dangers – of the nation state in the contemporary world.

As the meeting was held under the Chatham House rule, its participants may not be publicized, however a full programme is available.

Because the event was held under the Chatham House Rule, the full list of participants is confidential, but one of the observers posted this account of the day. Much of the the discussion concerned a newly-emerging, but also controversial, norm in international relations called Responsibility to Protect (usually abbreviated R2P). This concept was compared to other approaches to military intervention, such as just war and human rights, especially in light of the recent conflict in Libya.

The programme for the event is available here.