Theology

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide a survey of the recent and emerging conversations between theology (and more specifically moral theology or Christian ethics) and social anthropology (and more specifically the anthropology of morality). These conversations are presented as starting from two sides, as being a matter of theology attending to anthropology, and of anthropology engaging with theology. Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life is taken as providing an indication of the nature and promise of the first conversation for enriching theology’s social intelligence and its self-understanding (illustrated in particular by a discussion the Alder Hey scandal and of reproductive surrogacy), and Robbins’s Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life is taken as indicating the potential for the second, namely that beyond religious life providing material for ethnography, theological ideas and concepts may contribute to anthropological theory, even in relation to such central categories as the gift. The chapter closes with a consideration of some future directions which these conversations may take.