Professor Esther Reed
Professor
Theology and Religion
Esther D. Reed joined the Department of Theology and Religion in 2007. Previously, she taught for ten years at the University of St Andrews including one semester as the visiting O'Connor Professor at Colgate University, NY (Spring 2007). She was President of the UK Society for the Study of Christian Ethics Sept 2018-August 2021.
Esther's research and teaching are broadly in theological ethics and moral philosophy, with particular focus on un)just war reasoning and weapons control, prospects for jus in silico, and the future of military ethics.
She has particular research interests in
- (Un)just war reasoning in the 21st century
- The ethics of moral injury
- Deterrence in an age of unpeace
- Ethics and artificial intelligence
- Theology and criminal justice
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Theological ethics as biblical hermeneutics
She has 'lead' supervised 18+ research students to successful completion of PhDs, and 5+more to Masters by Research and MPhil awards. She open to talking with prospective students about their areas of interest.
Esther's book The Limit of Responsibility: Engaging Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a Globalizing Era (T & T Clark, August Bloomsbury 2018) was published recently. Responsibility is not a new topic in Christian ethics but too many accounts are delimited to the immediately personal. What’s needed in Christian ethics is a theologically informed theory of responsibility capable of grappling adequately with the new features of the problem of responsibility and reformulating the concept in ways that
- exceed agent-causality-consequence definitions that presuppose tight causal links between the agent’s actions and their effects
- face the temptation to relinquish the question of responsibility because, amidst the realities of globalization, the consequences of one’s own actions appear vanishingly small
- reckon with the unintended or unknown negative effects of actions on phenomena elsewhere
- make space for the additional concepts needed for the exercise of responsibility today: uncertainty, risk, solidarity, institutions, the future
- reverse the agent-act-consequence sequence to an understanding of responsibility that originates in You, that is learned from Christ and neighbor.
Esther has given numerous invited lectures including for the University of Bonn, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences; XII International Bonhoeffer Congress in Basel; New York Seminary; and University of Leuven.
Research supervision:
- The Problem of Moral Ambivalence: Revisiting Henry Sidgwick’s Theory of Rational Benevolence as a Basis For Moral Reasoning, with Reference to Prenatal Ethical Dilemmas
- 'World view' as a key for non-specialist teachers of RE
- An Examination of Prevalent 21st Century Models of Community Engagement by the Black Churches
- Moral Disengagement, Hope & Spirituality: Including an empirical exploration of combat veterans
- Theological Praxis of Emerging Churches in America
- How Thomas Arnold’s Christian convictions shaped his view of what makes a good education, with reflections and applications for the twenty-first century
- John Wesley's theology of liberty and human rights discourse in the Methodist Church GB
- The theology and practice of teetotalism in early Methodism
- Fear in the Life and Writings of Thomas More
- A new natural law critique, with particular reference to Robert P. George
- H. Richard Niebuhr’s Theological Ethics of God’s Goodness
- Experiences of NHS chaplaincy
- Missional churches in the UK
- Theological Praxis of Emerging Churches in America
- The Theology of Miroslav Volf
- A Theology of Disability
- Research Topics Supervised Elsewhere
- The Passions and the Moral Life
- Religious and Ethical Motifs in the Novels of George Eliot
- An Historical and Theological Analysis of Korean Fundamentalism
Qualifications:
BA (Hons), PhD (Dunelm)