"Professor Haldane's essays are serious in the way that the great writers
of the Scottish Enlightenment were serious. He asks what it means to be
human in the twenty-first century, and what ethical obligations our idea
of humanity imposes on us. They are provocative in the best, and only useful,
sense of the word: inviting the reader to consider and respond to his arguments.
Their range is wide, extending from a disquisition on the morality of stem-cell
research to a very funny parody of "The Da Vinci Code".
Alan Massie, author The Thistle and the Rose, columnist
Spectator, etc.
"This volume provides further evidence that John Haldane is our finest
contemporary philosophical journalist. No other recent figure has
written as elegantly or as insightfully about the contemporary landscape
of ethics, religion and the post-modern search for meaning. And surely
no one other than Professor Haldane could use such materials as the Toy
Story films and the British pantomime to gently instruct us about such
weighty matters as Pope Gregory the Great's revolutionary teaching on religion
and representational art."
David Solomon Director, Center for Ethics and Culture,
University of Notre Dame.
John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for
Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs in the University of St Andrews.
He has also held the Royden Davis Chair in Humanities at Georgetown University
and has been Stanton Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and Gifford
Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. He is a Consultor to the Pontifical
Council for Culture. His other publications include Atheism and Theism,
with JJC Smart (Blackwell), An Intelligent Persons Guide to Religion
(Duckworth), Faithful Reason and Reasonable Faith (Routledge) and
The
Church and the World (Gracewing)..