Talk with Prof Nigel Biggar CBE

Date

Monday, 11th December 2023

Time

From 7 pm

St James's Christmas Party

Join St James's Ward for their Christmas party at a beautiful private home under 10-minute walk from the Parliamentary estate.

We are delighted to welcome the renowned Oxford professor of moral and pastoral theology for a talk on his latest work. He is an expert in the following areas of study: ethics of empire, nationality, rights, war, assisted suicide & euthanasia, forgiveness & reconciliation; the role of religion in the public life of liberal societies and the bearing of theology on moral life.

Tickets included mulled wine, mince pies and other seasonal treats!

Young Conservatives: £20 per person
Two Cities Standard: £30 per person
Non-Members: £35 per person

Please note ticket sales close at 3 pm on Monday 11th December unless already sold out.

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Professor Nigel Biggar CBE, PhD
Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology

Nigel John Biggar CBE is an Anglican priest, theologian, and ethicist. From 2007 to 2022, he was the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, where he also directed the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life. Some of Nigel's most notable publications are as follows:

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (Williams Collins, 2023);
What’s Wrong with Rights? (Oxford, 2020);
Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (James Clarke/Wipf & Stock, 2014);
In Defence of War (Oxford, 2013); Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics (Eerdmans, 2011);
Religious Voices in Public Places (Oxford, 2009);
Aiming to Kill: The Ethics of Suicide and Euthanasia (DLT, 2004); (ed.)
Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict (Georgetown UP, 2003);
(co-ed. with Rufus Black) The Revival of Natural Law: Philosophical, Theological and Ethical Responses to the Finnis-Grisez School (Ashgate, 2000).

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
Nigel Biggar, 2021
Sunday Times Bestseller

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (Nigel Biggar).

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the End of History—that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now, however, with nationalist Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and authoritarian China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats.

But the threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the ‘decolonisation’ movement corrodes the West’s self-confidence by re-telling the history of European and American colonial dominance as a litany of racism, exploitation, and massively murderous violence.

In "Colonialism..." Nigel ("one of the leading living Western ethicists” - John Gray, New Statesman) tests the ‘decolonising’ indictment of the West by examining the record of the British Empire. Nigel addresses head-on, the crucial questions:

Was the Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate?
Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were the same thing?
Was the Empire essentially racist?
How far was it based on the theft of land?
Did it involve genocide?
Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation?
Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and
Was the Empire essentially violent, and was its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

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Talk with Prof Nigel Biggar CBE

St James's Christmas Party