Book launch for GFI resource 'Justice and Rights'
OP chaplain Bethan Willis and the team co-hosted a special book launch event on 24th February 2025 to celebrate the publication of an exciting new theological resource: Justice and Rights: Nicholas Wolterstorff in Conversation with the University, edited by Terry C. Halliday and K. K. Yeo as the first volume in a groundbreaking series, Cross-Disciplinary Encounters with Theology.
Along with the Global Faculty Initiative, Langham Publishing, and the Renaissance Project at Wycliffe Hall, we welcomed a full house of students, academics, and friends to hear from Nicholas Wolterstorff (Yale) via video call about his work on justice and theology, which formed the seed of the book through his GFI brief on the topic. Then the discussion opened up to a range of disciplines with a panel of academics reflecting on how their work and scholarship relates to issues of justice: we heard from John Coffey (History, Leicester), Lorna Smith (Chemistry, Oxford), Donald Hay (Economics, Oxford) & virtually, Dinesha Samararatne (Law, Colombo, Sri Lanka).
Attendees had the opportunity to ask a range of questions, learning from these expert thinkers and considering what justice might look like in their own contexts. Many robust conversations continued afterwards over drinks and nibbles.
The book is only the first of several planned in this series, each of which will take the starting point of a theological brief by a significant thinker on a topic, and invite responses across academic fields to create multi-voiced, interdisciplinary handbooks for how to understand God's world in all its complexity.
Photo: Langham Publishing