The Log | School News
Nicholas School Welcomes Visiting Theologian Michael Northcott
 Michael
Northcott, Reader in Christian Ethics in the School of Divinity
at the University of Edinburgh, visited Duke on sabbatical
this spring and taught a new course for Nicholas School students:
Ecology, Christian Ethics and Religion.
Co-listed at Duke Divinity School, Northcott’s course provided
Nicholas students a rare classroom opportunity. “Putting future
religious, community and environmental leaders in the same
room week after week to discuss these difficult issues is
an honest and necessary step,” says Nicholas School doctoral
candidate Kyle Van Houtan.
An ordained Episcopal priest, Northcott was deeply influenced
by time he spent teaching at a seminary in Malaysia, where
he witnessed the ecological effects of rampant economic development
and the frequent acquiescence of people of faith in environmental
destruction. This experience stimulated his research and writing
in the interrelations between Christianity and ecology.
William
H. Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School,
who was instrumental in bringing Northcott to the Nicholas
School, says, “Michael Northcott represents the best in modern
views of how Christianity must face up to the environmental
crisis.”
The course drew on Northcott’s widely-praised book, The
Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University
Press, 1996), critiquing the social and political forms of
life that have become so damaging to both human communities
and ecosystems, and exploring philosophical, scientific and
faith-based alternatives.
While in Durham, Northcott researched the reasons many conservative
Christians do not see ecological issues as a moral priority
for his new book, Ethics on Earth: Conservative Christians
and the Conservation of Nature.
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