The controversy surrounding gay marriage has now reached a fever pitch in countries like Australia and the UK, as governments have begun to move past debate and towards legislative change. While such intensity can have the benefit of clarifying just what is at stake - on both sides of the argument - it can also obscure some of the deeper, intrinsically related issues.

So, in the UK, the arguments put forward by the coalition government in favour of legalising gay marriage have been, appropriately, at once liberal and conservative. In liberal terms it is seen as a matter of equal rights; in conservative terms a matter of promoting the good of faithful, long-term relationships for homosexual as well as heterosexual people.

Those resisting the change - mostly, but not entirely, religious people - argue that the issue is being framed in the wrong way. For them it is not a matter of extending the right, nor the teleological good, of marriage to gay people, but rather of redefining the very thing in which marriage consists.

For centuries - indeed, for millennia - they argue, marriage has been understood as a conjugal relation between men and women linked to the natural bearing of children. Thus there is something monstrous about the state even claiming to have the power by law to change the definition of a natural and cultural reality which has historically preceded the existence of the state itself.

Opponents also point out that neither the United Nations nor the European Union regard homosexual marriage as a human right; rather, it is seen as a matter that must be left to the judgment of civil law and, by implication, to local cultural consensus.

Since a right to enter into heterosexual marriage is recognised, this means that currently the ius gentium - "international law" - recognises something specific about heterosexual union. The implication here is that to deny gays the right to marry is not to infringe their rights as human beings, because the right to marry only applies to human beings insofar as they are male and female. By analogy the right to a pension may be universal, but applies only to people over a certain age. International law, meanwhile, remains somewhat more agnostic as to whether the right to marry might be extended to gay people.

This leads to a crucial consideration. Historically, the very idea of marriage has been shaped by public recognition of heterosexual practice. It is precisely this fact which has often, at least until recently, led many gays themselves to argue that it is not an institution appropriate to homosexual practice. It is bound up with the securing of those kinship structures - of both horizontal affinities and vertical generations - which have always been central to the very constitution of human society.

Hence, marriage has to do with the "exchange" of men and women between social groups and with the procreation of children that secures the extension of lineages. Sometimes, and especially with the advance of time (as in the case of Christianity), the personal union of man with woman has also been granted a special symbolic value and has been seen as offering a specially intense degree of spiritual intimacy.

Homosexuality has always existed in human societies and sometimes has been tolerated or even made into an essential phase of cultural development - as with the Baruya or in ancient Athens. But it has never previously been linked to marriage - apart from parodic instances (as in ancient Rome) or marginal situations where for various reasons (including those of transgender) a male or female marital role is "performed" by someone not of that gender.

So there is no reason to suppose that those opposing gay marriage are necessarily opposed to homosexual practice as such. The issue is rather: Why should it now be thought that an inherently heterosexual institution should be extended to gay relations also?

Injustice and individual rights

Overwhelmingly the answer is that modern political discourse tends only to recognise as public goods things that can be equally appropriated by any given individual. It has great difficulties in acknowledging public goods that can only be exercised by certain groups or by individuals fulfilling certain social roles. This includes a refusal to entertain notions of public rights and obligations that might pertain to one sex rather than to the other, or to one sexual orientation rather than another.

The risk of this exclusive focus on individual rights is that the needs and capacities of people in their specific differences, which may be either naturally given or the result of cultural association, tend to be overridden. And so it is that injustice can arise in the name of justice.

One example of this is the way that economic pressures combined with liberal feminism have conspired to remove the notion of the "family wage" thereby effectively prohibiting some women - or, indeed, some men - from choosing to remain at home to bring up children and engage in non-waged social activities for some years of their lives.

A similar consideration might apply in the current debate over gay marriage. The deep reason for the reportedly rather inchoate and intemperate wrath of Scottish Cardinal Keith O'Brien in the face of the proposed alteration in marriage law is no doubt his sense that a supposed "extension" of marriage to gay people in fact removes the right to marry from heterosexual people.

This can seem like a perversely contorted claim, but its logic is quite straightforward: the intended change in the definition of marriage would mean that marriage as traditionally defined no longer exists. Thus heterosexual people would no longer have the right to enter into an institution understood to be only possible for heterosexuals, as doubly recognising both the unique social significance of male/female relationship and the importance of the conjugal act which leads naturally to the procreation of children who are then reared by their biological parents.

In effect, if marriage is now understood as a lifelong sexual contract between any two adult human persons with no specification of gender, then the allowance of gay marriage renders all marriages "gay marriages." Given such a situation, were it not for the space afforded by canon law (namely, the possibility of church marriage) a resort to cohabitation - which has hitherto been understood as "common-law marriage" - would be the only logical path for clear-thinking Christians.

The loss of sexual difference

There are two other reasons for the current unprecedented advocacy of gay marriage. The first is the decline of any public recognition of sexual difference and so the significance of sexually asymmetric unions, which I've already alluded to. The second, and arguably most important factor, is the technologisation of childbirth, allied to the increased acceptance of the adoption of children by gay couples.

Since the link between sex and childbirth is becoming increasingly tenuous, heterosexual marriage is increasingly connected with child-rearing rather than with procreation. In which case, indeed, why should not gay couples sustain the same connection with an equal capacity?

Are these reasons good reasons? It is notable that even the churches do not seem to dare to address the first issue of sexual difference, despite the fact that they recognise the validity of childless heterosexual marriage, that they have in modern times increasingly stressed mutual affection as one of the goods of the married state, and that both Augustine and Aquinas regarded marriage between man and woman as the most intimate mode of specifically natural human friendship.

In the realm of public discourse, assertion of sexual difference has become practically unspeakable, despite the fact that it is implicitly assumed and indeed spoken of by most ordinary non-intellectual people in the course of everyday life.

Moreover, there are crucial negative testimonies to its persistence. It would seem that when it is denied that a woman's body or biology has any psychic correlate, that then her purely physical difference gets vastly over-accentuated and exploited. Thus children are increasingly differentiated by gender to a ludicrous degree in terms, for example, of every item intended for little girls being coloured pink and the ever-younger adoption of sexualised clothes and make-up by adolescent and pre-pubescent girls.

Indeed, it has been plausibly argued that the "young girl" is now at once the prime commodity and the prime consumer of late capitalism. Is it an accident that the according of only "human" rights to women coincides with a new phase in their degradation?

Equally, the increased crisis of the masculine psyche suggests that we cannot just remove by fiat the greater propensity of men towards danger, risk, physicality, objectivity, transcendence and the need to be in charge. Faced with the prospect of being out-competed by women possessed of more personal skills, plus a stronger draw of physical focus (something both natural and today artificially enhanced) in the ever-expanding service sector, working and lower-middle class men are tending to retreat to the margins. This suggests that we need to learn how to channel male aptitudes to social advantage, rather than dogmatically to deny their instance, in the face of all the evidence.

Therefore, the issue of sexual difference and complementarity needs to be readdressed - however properly ineffable this topic may be. For it would seem clear that part of what has made marriage work, and indeed made it an exceptionally strong bond for millennia, is the asymmetry of perspectives and roles. Now much of the latter is rightly contested in the name of equality, but if it cannot be in certain subtle ways constantly and diversely reinvented, then divorce is likely to be ever more on the rise.

Asymmetrical reciprocity of gender needs to be reacknowledged as naturally rooted in bodily differences that, unsurprisingly, have psychic equivalents. Thus allowing that all generalisations are of course weak and constantly subject to exception, women tend to be actively receptive, embracing and inter-personal. Men tend to be attentively active, outreaching and object-orientated. The differences here are only hierarchical in the sense that one sex tends to outshine the other in certain respects, and the other sex in certain other respects. But cumulatively there is by nature an equality-in-difference.

This conclusion is by no means simply traditional since it rejects the patriarchalism that puts men naturally on top. Instead, it newly implies that just as we need men in the home, so we need women in politics, business, the arts, academia and even the military. This prospect belongs to a radical as opposed to a liberal feminism, because it suggests that a new public role of women can truly make a difference.

If the household has always been a political unit (as a male-female unity) then by contrast the "domestication" of the public sphere due to the increased presence of women who are truly women - as opposed to the fetishised passive functionaries deployed by late capitalism - should result in its radical transformation into something more fully human.

We can thus say that there are good reasons to suppose that sexual complementarity is crucial to the human order - just as it is crucial to the natural order, and perhaps even to the cosmic order, as many mythologies and religions have supposed. This is surely part of the reason why heterosexual marriage has received special public recognition and encouragement.

The logic of homosexuality

Can we say that homosexual relationships are of equal importance in the constitution of society? They may indeed be of some or even great importance - especially if we include the homoerotic and homosocial in a more general sense - but surely not of equal importance. This is partly for the simple reason that gay people tend to be in a small minority. But it also has to do with the different logic of homosexuality.

As James Alison - one of the most subtle and profoundly orthodox Catholic advocates of a theological recognition of homosexual practice - puts it, it is rather like comparing soccer to rugby (or maybe the other way round!): the rules as well as the objectives are simply otherwise. As a Girardian, Alison might appreciate that this has to do with the triangle of solidarity, rivalry and attraction.

Heterosexuals are in solidarity with members of their own sex, who may also become their rivals, and conversely they are attracted to the opposite sex. But homosexuals are at once in solidarity, rivalry and relations of attraction to their own sex which - as Girard himself has argued - tends to increase exponentially the contagion of mimetic desire and its resulting agon, not to mention the augmentation of narcissism.

On the other hand, homosexuals are neither in a relation of solidarity with nor attraction to the opposite sex, but may well sometimes be in a relationship of rivalry. This means that there is a certain constitutive alienation from the opposite sex built into homosexual logic. Of course, there can, to some extent, be a solidarity of homosexual perspective with the opposite sex, grounded in the fact that both share the same sexual object - but notoriously this can often be contrived, fragile and particularly subject to betrayal.

Does this structural analysis imply that homosexuality is necessarily a sinister reality? Certainly not - but it does suggest that a homosexual destiny is a particularly strenuous fate and ethical task. However, where this yoke is genuinely assumed, then there are also perhaps special unique gains which make a crucial social contribution.

Thus the coincidence of solidarity, attraction and rivalry in the case of one's own same sex can result in a more complete solidarity with it. Equally, the absence of either solidarity or attraction in relation to the opposite sex can lead towards a valuing of their pure human otherness for its own sake and a solidarity transcending gender difference altogether.

It is this doubly "angelic" potential of homosexuality which arguably leads so many gay people to a notably advanced degree of public dedication and transcendent creativity. Perhaps this is part of the reason why so many gay people are attracted towards Christian ministry and priesthood.

However, this structural analysis does suggest precisely why, for the ethically average, a heterosexual logic is more generally essential to human unity. Most people are, and need to be, bound to their own sex by simple natural solidarity of perspective, and bound to the opposite sex by sheer force of physical attraction.

It is partly for this reason that marriage has been publicly recognised as especially securing both the continuity of families (an analogous extension of the "same" of gender solidarity) and the alliance of one family with another (an analogous extension of attraction to the other sex).

The same analysis also indicates caution about extending marriage to gay couples. For it is arguable that more radical gays have a point in suggesting that fidelity and longevity of relationships do not have exactly the same imperative for a homosexual logic which tends, in its more sublime form, towards a human solidarity in general.

This is not, of course, to deny that permanence and exclusivity of gay relationships should not be encouraged, but it does suggest that the breakdown of these relationships is not the same social catastrophe as the collapse of a heterosexual marriage. This is partly because children are more often involved, partly because it more often tends to pull apart families linked through the marriage alliance, but also because the breakdown of a heterosexual relationship has more the appearance of a symbolic catastrophe as an instance of the failure of the permanent union of the two halves of the human race which are necessary for its procreative continuity.

This difference is, in fact, today publicly recognised in the circumstance that a gay civil partnership can be instantly dissolved on a whim, whereas divorce remains somewhat more cumbersome and protracted.

And here we see one of the irresolvable difficulties of redefining marriage: it would be intolerable to impose difficult divorce obstacles on gay people, but equally intolerable to make divorce entirely instant for heterosexual couples, since many marriages can be saved by allowing a longer time for consideration and by the sheer weight of the difficulties involved in legal separation. Yet to differentiate here in terms of sexual orientation would be, in effect, to once more distinguish between marriage and civil partnership.

Children, kinship and the grammar of society

The second reason for the new advocacy of gay marriage, alongside the flattening-out of sexual difference, is, as I've already indicated, the rise of acceptance of gay parenthood, taken alongside the increasing rupture between sex and childbirth.

Here both common-sense and empirical research suggest that the optimum condition for children is to be brought up by two parents of the opposite sex who are also their biological parents. Again this is a generalisation, subject to the severe limits of all generalisations: in many particular instances this is clearly untrue and in very many instances what matters is to make the best of what is not the optimum. By just this argument, it is surely the case that children are better-off being adopted by loving gay parents than being left to languish in one of the many unsatisfactory orphanages.

However, just as an orphanage does not involve a collective marriage, so also the allowing to gay couples of a child-rearing function does not of itself amount to an argument that they should be treated as "married." For the latter requires traditionally the idea that a sexual union leads to natural procreation.

Is this notion of any ethical relevance? One can argue that it is, because it so intensely combines the personal with the biological, and hence tends to prevent the "biopolitical" illusion which splits humans up into a wild, natural component on the one hand, and an artificial "cultural" component on the other.

In the one direction this can lead to fantasies about how we are naturally violent or egotistic (Hobbes) or else, to the contrary, naturally innocent (Rousseau). In the other direction this can lead to an over-technologised society, disparaging of ecological limits.

Instead, we need to hold onto the truth that we are a "cultural animal" - an animal whose nature it is to survive through the invention of cultures which are very diverse, though not wholly diverse from each other.

In relation to this assertion, it is useful to note how a balanced reading of the ethnographic evidence requires a recognition that marriage and the family are at once natural and cultural. It is true that this evidence no longer upholds a "neoconservative" - that is, conservatively liberal - understanding of the role of the family as the "natural" prime social building-block.

Maurice Godelier and others have shown how the tribal stress upon reproduction was linked also to a perpetuation of the identifying rituals of the tribe and indeed of the whole society, which determined, culturally, the exact patterns of kinship relations. Inevitably all this could only be authorised by "religion," and many archaeologists are now concluding - from the evidence of burial practices by both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon human beings - that religion is older even than spoken language.

All this can appear to place Christian apologetics in an odd dilemma, for precisely the evidence which "downgrades" the family at the origins reveals that humanity is above all homo religious and that the family is less a natural than a religious reality from the outset.

However, this dilemma only appears to arise from a neoconservative perspective. By contrast, a genuinely Catholic view will not be surprised to learn that the family was, from the outset, embedded in general ritual and social norms. Indeed, heterosexual exchange and reproduction has been hitherto the very "grammar" of social relating as such.

Therefore the abandonment of this grammar implies a society no longer primarily constituted by extended kinship, but rather by state control and merely monetary exchange and reproduction. The diminution of the role of kinship would here be of one piece with the decline of the role of locality and mediating institutions in general.

For the individual, the experience of a natural-cultural unity is most fundamentally felt in the sense that her natural birth is from an interpersonal (and so "cultural") act of loving encounter - even if this be but a one-night stand. This provides a sense that one's very biological roots are suffused with an interpersonal narrative - which can become an image for the idea that the natural world is the work of a personal creation.

Thus to lose this "grammar" would be to compromise our deepest sense of humanity - and risk a further handing over of power to market and state tyrannies supported by myths both of pure human nature and technocratic artifice.

It is for this reason that practices of surrogate motherhood and sperm-donation (as distinct from the artificial assistance of a personal sexual union) should be rejected. For the biopolitical rupture which they invite is revealed by the irresolvable impasse to which they give rise.

Increasingly, children resulting from anonymous artificial insemination are rightly demanding to know who their natural parents are - for they know that, in part, we indeed are our biology. But on the other hand, this request is in principle intolerable for donors who gave their sperm or wombs on the understanding that this was an anonymous donation for public benefit -- like blood donation properly precluding any personal involvement.

The recipe for psychological confusion, family division and social conflict involved here is all too evident and cannot be averted. In this instance we have sleep-walked into the legalisation of practices whose logic and implications have never been seriously debated.

From this it follows that we should not re-define birth as essentially artificial and disconnected from the sexual act - which by no means implies that each and every sexual act must be open to the possibility of procreation, only that the link in general should not be severed.

The price for this severance is surely the commodification of birth by the market, the quasi-eugenic control of reproduction by the state, and the corruption of the parent-child relation to one of a narcissistic self-projection.

Once the above practices have been rejected, then it follows that a gay relationship cannot qualify as a marriage in terms of its orientation to having children, because the link between an interpersonal and a natural act is entirely crucial to the definition and character of marriage.

The fact that this optimum condition cannot be fulfilled by many valid heterosexual marriages is entirely irrelevant, for they still fulfil through ideal intention this linkage, besides sustaining the union of sexual difference which is the other aspect of marriage's inherently heterosexual character.

If this is a debate the Church is bound to lose - what then?

So far, I have tried to frame my arguments in broadly "natural law" terms which can appeal to all human beings. Thus I have tried to indicate how, when human nature is flouted, either insoluble dilemmas arise, or else it reveals itself after all in a negative fashion.

Nevertheless, in the end the true character of human nature is only recognisable if one ascribes to the notion of a created order, and this is only likely to be done by people whose thinking already obscurely anticipates that the God who gives in creation will also give the knowledge of himself to rational spirits by grace.

In other words, the "nature" and the "reason" considered by secular people, on the one hand, and religious people, on the other, are not likely to coincide. Christians are likely to frame the debate over gay marriage in terms of the true human good, the proper goals that human beings should aim for. Secular people, on the other hand, are likely to reject the idea that such goals can be objectively shared in common, and to frame the debate in terms of rights and private utility.

For this reason the Church needs already to face the fact that it is quite likely to lose this debate, even if it should still try to win it. But if it does lose it, then how should it respond?

Here the question of whether marriage is primarily a natural or a sacramental reality is of crucial importance. I have already indicated how the ethnographic evidence suggests that it is simultaneously both. And this is how it has been regarded in the Latin Western tradition.

A marriage is primarily a de facto reality made by a consenting couple, without necessarily the involvement of either parents or clergy. However, it remains nonetheless a symbol of the bridal unity between Christ and his Church, which for St Paul is equivalent to the unity between God and the Cosmos. (Clearly, the centrality of this symbolism rules out the possibility of Christian gay marriage.) Consequently, while marriage was seen as radically natural, it also fell within the purview of canon rather than secular law.

Thus one response to the adoption of gay marriage by the secular state might be to revisit the implications of the historical rise of civil marriage. The latter might seem further to "naturalise" marriage, but we should surely not be surprised if it has meant precisely the opposite drift towards contract and artifice, culminating in the advocacy of marriage for homosexuals.

There is probably an implicit tendency in much theology to align "the natural" with "the civil" - but in reality the natural, the civil and the sacramental are three different dimensions, and this is relevant to the consideration of how, theologically, to approach marriage in the future.

For it is surely worthwhile for Christians at least to tarry for a while with the more radical secular notion that really the state has no business regulating human sexual relations at all. After all, if marriage is merely a matter of right, contract and utility, then why should we not revisit Schopenhauer's proposals for group marriages of four, or legalised menages-a-trois? And why refer to sex at all? Do we not simply need legal safeguards (for purposes of legacies) for any close human union? Indeed this is one argument for the preferability of civil partnership over marriage as a state legal entity.

I think that this radical position should be refused, on the grounds that it is desirable that the state give every possible legal and fiscal encouragement to marriage as a key institution of social bonding. And for the same reason Christians cannot remain satisfied with the argument that specifically heterosexual marriage remains possible for them through the agency of the Church.

However, it becomes a useful foil in the event of the universal advent of gay marriage. For then, instead of banging its head against a cognitive brick wall, the proper response of the Church should be to deem marriage under civil law a failed experiment and to resume its sacramental guardianship of marriage as a natural and social condition.

Here we face the question of whether, after the legalisation of gay marriage, the churches and other religious bodies can any longer be considered by the state as legal marriage brokers - as they are today in the UK but not in many other countries like France, where religious people must undergo both a religious and a civil registration.

At present, Church and State divergences in the understanding of marriage are tolerated with respect to divorce, and it is expected that this will be the same with respect to the admission of homosexuals to the married state. However, Catholic adoption agencies in the UK have now been expected to comply with the allowance of gay adoption (which has led to their closure) and by analogy there can be no guarantee that this situation will go unchallenged.

It would seem likely that the status of the Church as broker of state-recognised marriages will be questioned by many if they continue exercise what will be perceived as unjust discrimination against gay people. This possibility is much accentuated by the likelihood of a ferocious debate within the Anglican Church about allowing gay Church weddings. Indeed, this debate has the capacity to lead to eventual schism.

In order to seek to prevent such an outcome, it may well be best if the Anglican Church were to move swiftly to permit the blessing of gay civil partnerships in church. For this would render the strongest possible theological statement of the view that it is possible to recognise the legitimacy of faithful homosexual union without conceding that this is tantamount to marriage - a view that is entirely logical and has many historical precedents in different cultures.

The possibility of blessing same-sex friendships was already mooted by the Russian Orthodox philosophy Pavel Florensky early in the twentieth century, and while he made no mention of any homosexual character to these unions, it could well be argued that this silence continues to be advisable. For there is a certain sense in which physical love between members of the same sex is not "sex," as this term clearly implies sexual difference. Issues of acceptable modes of physical encounter (as in the case of heterosexual couples also) should surely be left to individuals and their confessors.

The ground for supporting this stance must be the probability that homosexuality indeed falls within the range of "natural" human behaviour. While, as I've already argued, the example of primate behaviour cannot be decisive for human norms, it nonetheless presents another curious apologetic dilemma for Christians, insofar as the presence of animal homosexuality would seem usefully to tell against any dogmatic insistence that all animal traits must be directly and obviously explicable in terms of evolutionary adaptation.

Perhaps, from a naturalistic point of view, animal homosexuality is an accidental spin-off from procreationary drives, and perhaps, equally, from a theological point of view, it can be taken as a feature merely of a fallen cosmos. Yet it seems more plausible to argue that homosexual behaviour can serve some purposes of social solidarity and that, in the human case, gay people may tend to have a very specific social role to perform within the created order, if they are able to negotiate positively the logic of the homosexual condition.

This does not necessarily mean that no homosexual behaviour whatsoever can ever be deemed pathological. It is rather always a matter of judgement. For while there is much evidence to suggest that homosexuality is sometimes an unshiftable orientation and that it is not well-predicted by given social or family circumstances (suggesting a genetic origin), it is also clear that in some cultures a majority can be initiated into homosexual practice and possibly desire.

Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that there is a certain degree of cultural and psychological latitude in this respect, even if there is no reason at all to suppose, after Freud, that we are all born with natural bisexual propensities of equal weight. And given this likelihood of a degree of cultural conditioning, it is also reasonable to argue that the cultural bias must lean towards heterosexuality, both because of its more readily negotiable social logic and its more basic function in binding together human society.

For the Church to abandon this bias would mean embracing a dubious theology separating soul from body by imagining ethereal souls entirely free from their corporeal and so engendered connections. And any such development would represent a retreat from the Latin development, after Augustine, away from the excessive Platonism of some Greek Fathers (though not, perhaps, Origen) who regarded embodiment and sexual difference as a lapse from an original created perfection.

And currently it would seem that a large majority of the British population share this bias, since, according to polls, a likely 70% are opposed to any redefinition of marriage - thereby indicating their sense of its centrality and specificity as an exclusively heterosexual institution. And yet 62% of the same population are in favour of gay civil partnership. These combined statistics suggest that a majority is in favour of enabling gay practice, but still regards this as significantly different from heterosexual practice.

However, it may well be that in the UK as elsewhere, liberal-metropolitan opinion will prevail against a common sense that is actually in tune with a sophisticated (as opposed to half-baked) intellectual consideration of the issue involved. In that case, the Church will need both to continue to deny that the state has the power to change the definition of marriage, and to offer a defence of nature under the embrace of sacramental grace.

Here the major weapon in its cultural armoury is the offer of a traditional Church wedding. Christians need to do all they can to promote the attractiveness of this event - which should include the churches getting involved in the offering of "total wedding packages." Such packages would offer reception, transport, photography and so on, all at a good standard yet at far more reasonable rates than their secular rivals. In this way, a secondary objective might also be achieved of reducing the ludicrously extravagant sums that are increasingly spent on weddings by people that can ill afford them. Of course these packages need to be backed-up by better pre- and post-marriage guidance than is offered elsewhere.

In a situation where marriage is becoming a less and less popular option for heterosexuals, there must be a chance for the churches to capture a greater proportion of the remaining marriage market, and further down the line to start to demonstrate to cohabiters that the path of natural and sacramental marriage makes much better human sense.

Thus the battle over gay marriage may well be lost, but this does not mean that Christians must also concede the war over the future of human sexuality.

John Milbank is Research Professor of Politics, Religion and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, and Chairman of the ResPublica Trust.