Biography
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, and gave the 2013 Bampton Lectures in Oxford.
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 Cambridge Journal of Anthropology will publish a collection of papers responding to the book in its second issue in 2015, and the McDonald Centre in the University of Oxford is hosting a conference around the book in May 2016.
His other publications include Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (CUP, 1999), and Christian Ethics: A Brief History (Blackwells, 2009).
He is currently a member of the Ministry of Defence's Advisory Committee on Less Lethal Weapons. Amongst his 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 and recently completed a nine-year term on the board of the Human Tissue Authority.
He has a particular interest in matters to do with ethical investment and good business, and has 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 recently taken on a new responsibility as Fellow for Development, working with the Alumni Relations and Development Office in advancing various initiatives to support students and research.
Michael is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on the Today programme.
Research
Current Principal Research Interests
- Christian Ethics
- The Anthropology of Morality
- The Nature of Moral Theology and its Relationships to Moral Philosophy and Social Anthropology
- The Ethics of Everyday Life
Publications
- The Justification of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief (OUP, 1990)
- Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (CUP, 1999)
- Ethics and the Doctrine of God, ed. with A.T. Torrance (T&T Clark, 2004)
- Christian Ethics: A Brief History (Blackwells, 2009)
- Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human (OUP, 2014)