Luke Bretherton

Luke Bretherton was born and raised in London and has lived in the United States for the past decade. His early work with faith-based NGOs across the world, together with his involvement in political and civic initiatives, raised questions about justice, power, and public life that eventually led him into academic theology. He is now the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford University. Prior to taking up the Regius Chair in 2025, he was the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology and a Senior Fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Before joining Duke, he taught at King’s College London.

His first book, Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (2006), explores how Christian theology can respond faithfully to moral and political pluralism. Engaging critically with Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy and broader currents in post-liberal thought, the book develops a constructive theology of hospitality, using debates around euthanasia and the hospice movement as a case study.

His second book, Christianity & Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (2010), winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing, examines the church’s involvement in social welfare, community organizing, refugee advocacy, and fair trade. Drawing on these practices, it offers an inductive account of what just and loving forms of political engagement look like in practice.

Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (2015) emerged from a four-year ethnographic study of a multifaith community-organizing initiative. The book, his third, explores the intersections of Christianity, democracy, globalization, poverty, and interfaith relations, arguing for a renewed "consociational" vision of democratic life rooted in shared practices of civic responsibility and solidarity.

His fourth book, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (2019), provides a wide-ranging introduction to the history and contemporary significance of Christian political theology. Addressing questions of poverty and injustice, life with strangers, and the exercise of power, it develops a distinctive theological case for democracy as a form of common life through which love of neighbor is exercised.

His most recent book is A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (2023). In this introduction to Christian ethics, Bretherton provides a new, constructive framework for addressing the question of how Christian beliefs and practices relate to living well amid the difficulties of everyday life and the catastrophes and injustices that afflict so many today.