Chapter 1 looks at depictions of human perfection in sources not usually consulted within Christian ethics. The first source is church memorials, first in Westminster Abbey -- particularly the twentieth-century Memorial to the Unknown Warrior and the seventeenth-century memorial to Isaac Newton -- and then seventeenth- and eighteenth-century family memorials in three parish churches near Canterbury Cathedral. The second source is recent depictions of perfection within the arts and sport mostly gleaned from the columns of The Times. And the last source is John Bayley’s autobiographical account of a ‘perfect’ meal cooked by his future wife, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. Together they indicate that a dynamic form of ‘perfection’ was, and still is, readily attributed to human endeavours.

Chapter 2 notes at the outset that there is a growing interest among biblical scholars in reception history that has spawned considerable theological attention to paintings, music and novels. This chapter is more personal in character, suggesting a number of artistic works where the author could not imagine, at the time, how they could have been done better – the first a complete performance by Yo Yo Ma of Bach’s Cello Suites at the 1995 Edinburgh Festival, the second an astonishing painting, the race-horse Whistlejacket by George Stubbs, featured in London’s National Gallery, and the third an ancient bronze sculpture, The Boxer at Rest, in Italy’s Museo Nazionale Romano. It also looks at a celebrated novel, The Bell, by Iris Murdoch that features a fictional sermon on Matt. 5.48 and raises significant issues about artistic and moral human perfection and the contentious distinction between Murdoch’s novels and her philosophical writings. The chapter also looks at the debates about the theological relevance of the arts variously by David Jasper, Paul Fiddes, David Brown and Jeremy Begbie today, with reference also to Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich of the previous generation.

The aim of this chapter is to establish that children are owed a sense of their own interiority. The chapter argues that although the literature on philosophy of childhood constitutes an advance on the deficit model of childhood insofar as it supports children’s rights and childhood goods, it risks reifying adult-child relations by continuing to essentialize childhood. While Gareth B. Matthews’ theory of development as socially and linguistically mediated begins to shift the focus toward the child’s own inner life, it falls short insofar as it fails to challenge the fact/value dichotomy. Drawing upon Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, the chapter concludes that a rejection of this dichotomy is in fact necessary for developing the notion of a morally inflected consciousness that is as available to children as it is adults.

Two years ago, in February 2021, I began writing a blog that expanded on my book, A Tattoo on my Brain: A Neurologist’s Personal Battle against Alzheimer’s Disease. Some of the regular readers of that blog may have noticed that I have not posted for a while. I aimed at writing something every week. Sometimes I missed a week, but by the beginning of 2023, I was stuck for nearly month. The truth is I have been having a lot of trouble thinking of anything interesting to write. I literally sit staring at a blank screen on my computer, unable to start writing. After several weeks of frustration, it dawned on me that I have writer’s block.

In this chapter, I suggest that sexual ethics as it is present in much sex education fails to address some common and formative aspects of many people’s sexual lives. I argue that the foundation of sexual ethics, as part of the ethical life more broadly, is best captured by the metaphor of vision. Any sexual ethics that treats isolated moments of sexual action as the focus of what it means to be sexually moral is insufficient because it ignores the influence that the way people see the world can have on their sexuality (and vice versa). Moral vision is shaped by character, and the way people engage their sexuality is a formative arena for character. So, sex education must address issues of character, and, conversely, attempts at character education must address the power sexuality possesses in the formation of persons.

This chapter attempts to answer two questions. First, what does democratic education informed by critical theory minimally entail? Second, what does it take for a critical democratic education to succeed? The chapter argues that attention to local contexts is a necessary aspect for developing critical and democratic virtues. The chapter first sets the stage by offering a sketch of both democratic education and critical theory. The following section draws out a common occluding characteristic of both democratic education and critical education, namely, their preoccupation with national and global scopes. The next two sections draw on the work of Iris Murdoch and John McDowell to argue that cultivating moral attention to one’s local setting must be seen as an essential aspect of critical democratic education. The chapter concludes by offering brief educational applications and responses to objections related to objectivity and the threat of parochialism.