Nigel Biggar

Nigel Biggar was born in March 1955 and educated at Monkton Combe School, near Bath, Somerset. After reading Modern History at Worcester College, Oxford, Biggar studied religion, theology and ethics at Regent College in Vancouver and the University of Chicago.

On his return to Oxford in 1985, he became Librarian and Research Fellow at Latimer House, and then for most of the 1990s, he was Chaplain and Fellow of Oriel College. In 1999, he took the Chair of Theology at the University of Leeds, and in 2004 he moved to the Chair of Theology and Ethics at Trinity College, Dublin.[5]

Biggar is the leader of a five-year project at Oxford University entitled "Ethics and Empire".[7] In 2017, Biggar addressed the ethics of colonialism in an op-ed for The Times. Writing about the work of Bruce Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University in the United States, he defended Gilley's "courageous call for a balanced reappraisal of the colonial past" and called for the recognition "that the history of the British Empire was morally mixed".[8] Cambridge University's Reader of Post-colonial Literature Priyamvada Gopal said his article contained opinions which amount to "outright racist imperial apologetics".[9] One of Biggar's Oxford colleagues, James McDougall wrote an open letter disagreeing with Biggar signed by around 170 international academics.[10][11] Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equalities Commission, defended Biggar against his critics in a letter to The Times: "Students’ misreading of history is entirely understandable if they are instructed by the academics who criticise Nigel Biggar for asking ‘the wrong questions, using the wrong terms'".[12]

• In Defence of War
• Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics
• Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict
• Aiming to Kill
• The Hastening that Waits: Karl Barth's Ethics
• Good Life: Reflections on What We Value Today
• Biggar, Nigel; Hogan, Linda, eds. (2009). Religious Voices in Public Places. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199566624.