The Disappearance of Ethics: The Gifford Lectures
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
The capstone lectures of esteemed ethicist Oliver O’Donovan
What is the future of ethics? Oliver O’Donovan addresses a discipline in crisis in The Disappearance of Ethics. Based on the 2021 Gifford Lectures, this book contends that contemporary ethics has lost its object (good), frontier (time), and agent (person).
O’Donovan traces the development of these concepts from Greek philosophy through early Christianity, the Enlightenment, and into the modern era. Engaging with a range of thinkers including Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Max Scheler, Karl Barth, and more, O’Donovan shows how ethics has lost its heart and how the field can regain its purpose. He completes his lectures by integrating theology and philosophy to recover ethics. Contemplating theological concepts such as creation, divine law, and justification undergirds ethics by generating “existential wonder.”
With characteristic warmth and scholarly precision, O’Donovan reinvigorates ethical argument with theological insight. Scholars and students of Christian ethics will find his lectures equally provocative and inspiring.
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- Contends that contemporary ethics has lost its object (good), frontier (time), and agent (person)
- Traces the development of these concepts from Greek philosophy through early Christianity, the Enlightenment, and into the modern era
- Reinvigorates ethical argument with theological insight
- Introduction
- 1. The Missing Object
- 2. The Missing Frontier
- 3. The Missing Person
- 4. Creation and the Recovery of Reality
- 5. Law and the Recovery of History
- 6. Spirit and the Recovery of Agency
- Title: The Disappearance of Ethics: The 2021 St. Andrews Gifford Lectures
- Author: Oliver O'Donovan
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 161
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subject: Ethics › Religious aspects--Christianity
- ISBNs: 9780802883490, 0802883494
- Resource ID: LLS:DSPPRNCTHCLCTRS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-01-20T21:59:06Z
Oliver O’Donovan, born in 1945 in London, held teaching posts at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and Wycliffe College Toronto before becoming Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology and Canon of Christ Church at the University of Oxford in 1982. He was Professor of Christian Ethics & Practical Theology at Edinburgh from 2006 to 2012. Ordained as a priest of the Church of England, he was an active participant in ecumenical dialogue and a past President of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2000.
He is the author of a number of well-received works on faith and ethics, including On the Thirty-Nine Articles (Paternoster, 1986), The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge University Press, 1996), The Ways of Judgment (2005) and Begotten or Made? (Oxford University Press, 1984)
He is married to Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, and have two sons and four grandchildren.
Jointly he and his wife are the authors of a well-received collection of readings in the history of Christian political thought, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100 – 1625 (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999) and of a volume of essays, Bonds of Imperfection. Christian politics past and present (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2004).