Dr Michael Barnes
Email: m.barnes@heythrop.ac.uk
Telephone: 020 7795 4257
Biography
Dr Michael Barnes is Reader and Senior Tutor in Interreligious Relations. He has been Senior Tutor at Heythrop, a member of the Academic Board and a Governor of the College. He taught Buddhism at the Pontifical Gregorian University for some years and has also been Director of Westminster Interfaith, an agency of the Diocese of Westminster dedicated to developing good relations between communities of faith in the London area.
He has been a consultant to the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue in Rome. He is a member of the Roman Catholic Committee for Other Faiths and has also served as a theological consultant to the ecumenical Churches Commission on Inter-faith Relations. From 1996 to 2001 he was General Editor of The Way journals.
Current teaching
Dr Michael Barnes lectures in interreligious relations, the theology of religions and religious studies.
Research
His main academic interests include the relationship between Christianity and other religions, inter-faith spirituality, comparative theology, and philosophical and hermeneutical issues in the history and theology of religions.
Publications
He has written many articles in journals such as The Month, The Way, The Heythrop Journal, Religion, Spiritus and The British Medical Bulletin, and contributed to various symposia on inter-religious matters. He has written three books published in the UK: Religions in Conversation (SPCK: 1989), God East and West (SPCK: 1991) and Theology and the Dialogue of Religions (Cambridge University Press; 2002) - a theological study of inter-religious encounter which draws on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. His contribution to Comparative Theology, Interreligious Reading: Dialogue, Spirituality and the Christian Imagination, will be published by Cambridge University Press.
Published in India are two short books: Walking the City, subtitled Christian discipleship in a multi-faith society (ISPCK; 1999), and Traces of the Other, subtitled Three philosophers and inter-faith dialogue (Satya Nilayam; 2000). These are based on the Teape lectures, given in Delhi, Pune and Bangalore, in 1998, and the Arrupe Memorial Lectures, given in Chennai, India, also in 1998. He has published contributions to the New Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (SCM; 2005), the Handbook of Religious Studies (2nd ed. Routledge; 2010) and the Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, (Blackwell, 2006). He has also contributed essays to collections honouring his fellow Jesuit theologians of religion, Jacques Dupuis (In Many and Diverse Ways; Orbis: 2003) and Aloysius Pieris, Encounters with the Word (Colombo: 2004).
Other interests
Since 1999 Michael Barnes has lived and worked in Southall, in West London, where he is actively involved in inter-faith relations. He teaches a course on Catholic Christianity at the Muslim College in Ealing. Between 2007 and 2009 he was engaged in developing Faiths Together, an innovative educational project which brought persons from different faith communities into direct contact with each other so that they could learn with and from each other. He is now working on an extension of this project and a study of inter-faith relations and social cohesion in West London.