Arthur Mc Gill did not write very much, but what he did write is as theologically suggestive and startling today as it was when it was written in the 1960s and 1970s. He was not well known during his lifetime, but those who cared about the work of theology knew Arthur Mc Gill. Writing during the ascendency of the ‘Death of God’ theologies, Mc Gill’s words have a freshness that the more widely known theological writing of that time has lost. Mc Gill wrote only two short books during his life, and just a handful of scattered essays, often published in obscure places. We are fortunate that Kent Dunnington has collected and introduced those essays here. The essays reveal a theologian with an uncanny and intrepid resolve to make theological claims illumine and unsettle our lives. As Stanley Hauerwas writes in his afterword to the collection, ‘To read Mc Gill is to discover a way to do theology without fear. God knows from where he came, but Mc Gill, as the chapters in this welcome and important book demonstrate, had the ability to make theology do work so that we might better negotiate the imponderable reality we call ‘our life. »
A propos de l’auteur
Stanley Hauerwas is professor emeritus of ethics at Duke University where he held the Gilbert T. Rowe chair for more than twenty years. Among his numerous publications are Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (1998) and Living Gently in a Violent World, with Jean Vanier (2008). His latest publication is Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth (University of Virginia Press, 2023).