On 27 February 2026, Professor Luke Bretherton, Director of the McDonald Centre, delivered the Prideaux Lecture at the University of Exeter, hosted by the Department of Theology and Religion.
In his lecture, Professor Bretherton argued that recovering the social practice of the commons offers both a theological vision and a practical framework for addressing today’s intertwined ecological and political crises.
Drawing on Aristotelian and Thomistic accounts of the common good, alongside a Christological understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God, he presented commoning as a participatory and democratic form of political economy. Such a vision resists the extractive logics of contemporary capitalism and what Pope Francis has called “the technocratic paradigm.” Professor Bretherton traced how the historical enclosure of the commons generated cycles of dispossession and ecological degradation; dynamics that persist today in new forms of digital and planetary enclosure shaped by AI and algorithmic capitalism. Against this backdrop, he proposed commoning as a way of re-embedding economic life within moral and ecological relationships, fostering agency, reciprocity, and shared responsibility among human and non-human neighbours alike.
The Prideaux lectures are funded by an endowment in the will of Canon S P T Prideaux, to honour the memory of Bishop John Prideaux of Worcester. They take place with the cooperation of the University of Exeter, the Diocese of Exeter and Exeter Cathedral.
