Portrait of Richard Harries, bishop and writer
Reading List
Richard Harries
Bishop and Writer
Richard Harries (1936-2026) was Bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006 and sat in the House of Lords as Lord Harries of Pentregarth. He read theology after a short army career, and spent much of his working life on the boundary between Christian belief and public argument.
His books include Art and the Beauty of God, God Outside the Box, The Re-Enchantment of Morality and Faith in Politics?, along with studies of Christian-Jewish relations and of the moral questions raised by war and by medical ethics. He chaired the Church of England’s Board for Social Responsibility and served on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
A frequent broadcaster on Thought for the Day, he wrote on the arts as often as on doctrine, and argued consistently that religious conviction belongs in public reasoning rather than apart from it.
Dishonest to God
On Keeping Religion Out of Politics
by Mary Warnock
“I entirely agree with all that, and my view is that we must recognise and celebrate values whoever puts them forward, whether people are believers or not. But where I think Mary Warnock goes badly wrong is the impression she gives that all religious morality is of the command variety – these are God’s commands, these are God’s laws. She seems to suggest that these are God’s laws only for believers.” — via Interview, September 2010
Climbing the Bookshelves
The Autobiography of Shirley Williams
by Shirley Williams
“Shirley Williams is also a person of very strong conviction, but, as she herself said, she perhaps lacked enough confidence and ruthlessness to aim for the top job. She is a woman who had to fight her way in what was then a very male-dominated world, and, although extremely able, clever and with very passionate convictions, did not have that extraordinary sense of destiny that de Gaulle appeared to have.” — via Interview, September 2010
The General
Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved
by Jonathan Fenby
“Another aspect this very well-written book brought home to me was how much suffering and violence the French have been through, for example in the Occupation, the Resistance, the Vichy government, the reprisals, all the killings that went on over Algerian independence, and the numerous assassination attempts on de Gaulle himself; an extraordinary period of violence which on the whole we escaped in Britain.” — via Interview, September 2010
An Awareness of What is Missing
Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age
by Jürgen Habermas
“We need to recover a moral vision, which for Habermas draws very deeply on the wells of religion. And he has a very interesting approach to religion, because he thinks that while religion has been essential and is essential now, religion must translate its concepts into what the philosopher John Rawls would call ‘public reasoning’, concepts which the ordinary citizen can understand.” — via Interview, September 2010
Ill Fares the Land
by Tony Judt
“I found Tony Judt, who has just died, very honest and wise. All the obituaries said he was a wonderfully stimulating teacher, but I only know him through his writing. His thesis is that over the last 30 or 40 years life has been dominated by the pursuit of wealth, by an excessive individualism, and by the desire of people to express and fulfil themselves.” — via Interview, September 2010