Join us in Hudson Yards, New York with Dr Michael Banner, Fellow and Dean of Chapel, who will be leading a brief discussion on slavery reparations on Friday 17 February. More details to follow when you register.

Michael Banner has been Dean, Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at Trinity College since 2006. He was previously the Director of ESRC Genomics Forum and Professor of Ethics and Public Policy in Life Sciences in the School of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, University of Edinburgh, and from 1994 to 2004 F.D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology, King’s College, London. He was the Peden Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University in 2012, gave the 2013 Bampton Lectures in Oxford, and was the Charles Gore Lecturer at Westminster Abbey in 2019.

The Bampton Lectures were published in 2014 by Oxford University Press as The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the Imagination of the Human. The book was the basis for a symposium at a meeting of the American Academy of Anthropology of Religion in San Diego in the spring of 2015, the papers from which are now published in the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (Vol. 33, No. 2, 2015, pp. 111–139). The book was also the subject for a conference organised by the McDonald Centre in the University of Oxford in May 2016, and for session at a conference at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in September 2016. The papers from the Oxford conference, with Michael Banner’s response, were published in 2019 by Georgetown University Press as Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life, edited by Michael Lamb and Brian Williams.

His other publications include Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (CUP, 1999), and Christian Ethics: A Brief History (Blackwells, 2009). His most recent paper, ‘Telling Lies, Telling Tales and Telling (and Doing) the Truth: Racism, Moral Repair and the Case for Reparations’, was published in January 2022 and addresses the question of British debts to the West Indies. In 2016 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the University of Cambridge for his published works.

Amongst previous committee experience, he chaired a Committee of Enquiry for the Ministry of Agriculture from 1993 to 1995, the CJD Incidents Panel at the Department of Health, the Home Office’s Animal Procedures Committee from 1998 to 2006, and the Shell Panel on Animal Testing from 2002 to 2009. He also served as a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for six years, was for nine years on the board of the Human Tissue Authority and chair of its Audit Committee, and served as a member of the Ministry of Defence’s Advisory Committee on Less Lethal Weapons from 2012 to 2021. He also did a term on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

He has an interest in matters to do with ethical investment and good business, and served for eight years on advisory boards for F&C Asset Management and Friend’s Life, in the City of London.

At Trinity College he has responsibility as Chair of Alumni Relations and Development for the College’s engagement with its alumni and for its development programme.

Michael is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on the Today programme. Any recent contributions to Thought for the Day may be found through the link.

His current research focuses on migration, slavery and incarceration, and in 2022 he will give a number of papers and lectures around the issue of reparations. He will also make further contributions to the Visual Commentary on Scripture and will hope to complete a long essay on the topic of criminal justice and social deprivation. An essay on the relationship between theology and anthropology will appear in the Cambridge Companion to Anthropology.

Please note that registration for this event has now closed. If you would like to attend, please email [email protected]