Recent social change has produced a relocation of the sense of personal identity from communities rooted in time and place to voluntary associations gathered around common interests. In consequence, the focus of moral consciousness has shifted from natural human values to constructed, systems of rights and obligations.

Against these trends I argue that while times and circumstances change, the principal moral truths remain constant as do their implications for the place of ethics in public life: first, do no evil; and second, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What lies beyond is not in the field of moral law, though it may be in the field of moral virtue. Here what is required is, as St Augustine, Adam Smith and Aurel Kolnai would say, human wisdom; and it part of human wisdom to recognize that in public life where what is at issue includes the well-being of the community, one does better to strive for the good and the acceptable than to seek for the perfect.

Much contemporary theological aesthetics treats beauty as straightforward. This is, however, to neglect tensions in our experience and understanding of beauty. The issue of these tensions arises in the examination of the role of the imagination in the epistemology of beauty, as well as in the examination of the relationships between beauty and truth, and beauty and goodness. The treatment of these relationships in the work of Kant and Maritain is assessed. The aesthetics of Kant and Maritain are classic attempts to address and even overcome the tensions in these relationships, but on close examination fail to do so. That writers whose works are often cited in favour of clear-cut positions do not resolve these tensions, and that questions raised by these issues fail to go away, supports the view that these tensions are inherent in our experience and understanding of beauty. If so, and if beauty is understood as in some way revelatory of the divine, it follows that there are tensions inherent in our experience and understanding of beauty as revelatory. Such tensions need to be incorporated into theological aesthetics.

The ability of Christian discourse to give people a sense of their identity sustains the concrete church. The cultural revolt of the 1960s which suddenly weakened the power of discursive Christianity in Britain may be partially explained in terms of the deterritorializing power of capitalism. In the context of this deterritorialization the formation of self-identity becomes more difficult and strong religious identities have a new appeal. Post liberal theologians have endorsed the identity-forming power of the church. But Christian identity must still be worked out in relation to what lies beyond the borders of the church. Christians rediscover their own foundational story in the acts and deeds of others. Theological formation should involve not only an immersion in the Christian tradition but also the search for what recognisably shares in the same project that the gospel defines. The history of personalism suggests what this search might look like in practice.

In Jeffrey Archer's The Gospel According to Judas, Judas dismisses the virginal conception of Jesus as no more than another example of ‘Greek myths that tell of gods in heaven who produce offspring following a union with women of this earth’. To attribute such a view to a first-century Jew like Judas seems strange, since the earliest evidence shows Jewish critics of the Christian movement rejecting the virginal conception as a case of illegitimacy. In any case such Greek myths do not provide plausible sources for the two Gospel accounts of the virginal conception. Yet such merely historical debate is insufficient. One should press on to illustrate the religious significance and theological importance of the virginal conception within the whole story of Jesus: for instance, the role of this conception in revealing the Trinity at work for human salvation.

The exemplum is a short edifying tale that uses a historical person's positive or negative character traits to make a moral point. Its homiletic suitability ensured the genre's widespread use throughout premodern Europe. Not only were exempla effective preaching instruments on which a travelling friar could rely, but they also were extremely elastic in their application. A closer look at two late thirteenth-century English texts, Ralph Bocking's Latin Life of St Richard of Chichester (Vita sancti Ricardi) and the Life of St Dominic in the anonymous South English Legendary, a Middle English cycle of saints' lives, will explore two original ways in which mendicant hagiographers attempt to conceal and yet betray their intentions through their choice of hagiographic exempla. The first, I argue, petitions the patron, Isabella of Arundel, for a gift to the Order of Preachers, whereas the second text shows evidence of having been composed by a Dominican friar.