Dr Joel Pierce, CISRUL alumnus and administrator at Christ’s College, University of Aberdeen, recently published his first book, Rights, Virtue, and Others in MacIntyre: Community After the Fall, drawn from and building on his 2021 PhD dissertation.
In the book, Pierce discusses the scepticism of rights and liberalism more generally amongst contemporary Christian political theologians. This includes Alasdair MacIntyre, with Pierce arguing that rather than human rights being contrary to MacIntyre’s ‘vision of practices, virtue, and tradition’, they are ‘necessary to stop that vision being appropriated in problematic ways and to help it take those outside of one’s own community seriously.’
The book has been very well reviewed, including amongst academics from the Universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews, and Auckland. Bringing MacIntyre into conversation with various thinkers such as Edward Said and Willie James Jenning, and with today’s context of rising populism in mind, the book offers a nuanced and compelling take on MacIntyre’s understanding of rights. As the University of St Andrews’ Dr John Perry describes, Pierce’s reading is one which ‘follows in MacIntyre’s footsteps but displays greater global inclusion, dialogue, and humility.’
Since completing his PhD, Pierce has continued his work at the University of Aberdeen, including pursuing research with others on interfaith relations and the effects of migration on the way Christianity is practiced in Aberdeen. In Pierce’s CISRUL profile he describes himself as continuing to ‘maintain an interest in the work of MacIntyre, while developing a more recent focus on the thought of Hannah Arendt’.
In addition to his book, this year he has also published a journal article with Dr Doaa Baumi, on ‘Online scriptural reasoning as a pedagogical tool for fostering intercultural understanding and empowering women’ in the Journal of Education in Muslim Studies, and a more recent media article titled ‘Artificial Intelligence needs these school lessons to avoid a Frankenstein fail’.