Author: Kevin Hargaden

Why Are Peaceful Protestors Treated as Such a Threat?

In October 2022, two young people from the environmental activist group, Just Stop Oil, walked into the National Gallery in London carrying tins of soup. They opened one tin and hurled it over the glass protecting Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting Sunflowers. The painting itself was unharmed. The seventeenth-century Italian frame was splashed. It needed some… Read more »

Housing, Students, and the Common Good

Every August and September, the housing shortage shows up on campus. First year students move across the country without certainty about where they will sleep. Returning students juggle long commutes, term-time sublets, and rising rents. Parents bounce desperate messages into WhatsApp groups looking for leads. This is now a familiar seasonal pattern, yet it points… Read more »

Ìmage of an original Laufmaschine des Karl Drais from 1817, on display at Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum. Sourced at: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Laufmaschine_des_Karl_Drais%2C_1817_-_Deutsches_Museum_Verkehrszentrum.JPG

The Prophetic Origins of the Bicycle

In April 1815, the Mount Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted with a force unmatched in recorded history. A massive plume of ash and gas reached the stratosphere, darkening the skies. The year before, a lesser eruption in the Philippines had already primed the atmosphere. Together, they ejected extraordinary quantities of debris into the environment. The… Read more »

We need a Green “Bread, not Bombs”

A rallying cry heard throughout the 20th century was “Bread, not bombs.” The original phrase captured the moral demand to prioritise human need over militarism, often in Cold War and anti-poverty contexts. But in the face of climate collapse, biodiversity breakdown, ecological injustice, and environmental racism, a reframing is badly needed. The drums of war… Read more »

Formed by More Than Algorithms: Why theology needs to care about democracy in a digital age

Next week, I will be presenting at a gathering of theologians, ethicists, and social scientists in Salzburg, Austria. The event, organised by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns, and its focus is democracy. Or more precisely, democracy under threat. For many years now, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has affirmed democracy as the… Read more »

Pope Francis smiling and blessing a child

In Memory of an Unlikely Pope

A Presbyterian Appreciation of Pope Francis Sometimes people ask me how I ended up directing a Jesuit social research centre, as a Presbyterian theologian. At this stage, the polite answer rolls out of my mouth with barely any thinking required.  But if I was to tell the truth, I would have to say that it… Read more »

The Politics of Proximity (on Easter Saturday)

Today is the day between. Not death, not resurrection — just silence. Easter Saturday stretches out as a long pause in the Christian imagination: a space of absence, of waiting, of unknowing. It is a day we are not good at inhabiting. We prefer the drama of the Cross or the joy of the empty… Read more »

News  

When the Data Hurts: Children, Roads, and the Refusal to Change

What we are witnessing is a form of societal resignation. We tolerate a level of road danger that curtails the freedom of children to move through their communities. This is a moral issue. When we fail to police motor offences, when we design streets around the convenience of cars rather than the safety of people, we make a clear choice: to prioritise speed and flow over life and freedom.

7 traffick lights either facing different ways or giving mixed messages

Crisis as Opportunity: How Christians Can Respond to the Chaos of New Regimes

Introduction: Manufactured Chaos We are living through a moment of extraordinary political upheaval. From the United States to Europe, leaders who present themselves as defenders of “common sense” are reshaping societies in ways that benefit the wealthy while dismantling protections for the vulnerable. At first glance, many of these policies seem chaotic: reactive, rushed, even… Read more »

A fully loaded long-tail cargo-ebike

E-Bikes and a Thought Experiment in DeGrowth Thinking

There’s a common trope that we have a name for an entity that seeks to grow without limit (as our variety of capitalism demands) and it is cancer. There’s a deeper, fundamental critique that even anticipating the wonderful gains of efficiency that can come from market competition, infinite growth with finite resources is bound to… Read more »