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About Prof Wayne Morris

As a practical theologian, I seek to contribute to shaping new thinking and practice on questions of justice, equality and human rights, and human well-being. I engage these questions with a range of religious and theological perspectives, conscious that religious ideas can lead to extraordinary acts of goodness as well as some of the most horrific acts of history.

I joined the University of Chester in September 2003. I was appointed senior lecturer in 2007, Deputy Head of Theology and Religious Studies in 2010, Head of Department in August 2014, and Director of the School of Humanities in 2017. I very much enjoy combining working with students at all levels of study and sharing in the management of our excellent School.  Prior to coming to Chester I held various teaching roles at Birmingham University and I worked for two charities: Sense for deafblind people, and a small ecumenical charity promoting disability rights. In January 2014, I was appointed editor for the journal, Practical Theology.

Teaching

Undergraduate:

  • Global Perspectives on Christianity
  • Contextual and Practical Theology

Postgraduate:

  • Themes and Methods in Practical and Contextual Theology
  • Religion and Disability
  • Publishable Article (Practical Theology Professional Doctorate)

Research

Research interests:

  • Disability and Equality
  • The Deaf Community and British Sign Language
  • Minority Indigenous Language Groups
  • Non-Literate Communities
  • Inter-Faith Dialogue

PhD (and D Prof) supervision:

I welcome enquiries for research at doctoral level in any of my research areas listed above.

External Funding:

  • 2012 Church Colleges and Universities Fund, knowledge transfer funding to develop work in Religious Literacy and Church Schools’ Studies with public and private sectors - £21,000
  • 2011 Bible Society Funding for Symposium: ‘World Beyond Words’ - £1,000 (Joint Project with Dr Louise Lawrence, University of Exeter)
  • Date Philosophy and Religious Studies Subject Centre funding for a project on developing an undergraduate programme in theology through the medium of British Sign Language - £6,000
  • 1999 University of Birmingham PhD funding for project, Theology without Words - £2,610
  • 1999 St Luke’s College Foundation PhD funding for project, Theology without Words - £4,000

Elsewhere on the web:

Published Work

Books:

  • Wayne Morris (ed.), Acedia and the Transformation of Spiritual Malaise: Essays in Honour of Martin McAlinden (Chester: University of Chester Press, 2019).
  • Salvation as Praxis: A Practical Theology of Salvation for a Multi-Faith World (London: T&T Clark, 2014) 
  • Hannah Bacon and Wayne Morris with Steve Knowles (eds), Transforming Exclusion: Engaging Faith Perspectives. (London: T&T Clark, 2011)
  • Theology without Words: Theology in the Deaf Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
  • Roy McCloughry and Wayne Morris, Making a World of Difference: Christian Reflections on Disability (London: SPCK, 2002)

Journal articles:

  • The Embodied Deaf God: A God Just Like Us’, Practical Theology, (Accepted for Publication, volume 12, 2019).
  • ‘Towards a Liberation Theology of Indigenous Minority Language Groups: A Case Study on the Welsh Language’, Practical Theology, 9.1 (2016): 58-70.
  • ‘No Salvation without the Church: Interfaith Praxes in the Company of Pope Francis’, Practical Theology, 7.4 (2014): 294-304.
  • ‘Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity: The Wounded Christ and Human Vulnerability’. Irish Theological Quarterly 78.2 (2013): 231-243.      

Edited chapters

  • ‘Individualism or Interdependence? In search of more complex models of society from disability perspectives’. In Wood, B. J. (ed.), Renewing the Self: Contemporary Religious Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017) pp.162-178.
  • Transforming Tyrannies: Disability and Christian Theologies of Salvation’. In Bacon, H. and Morris, W. with Knowles, S. (eds), Transforming Exclusion: Engaging Faith Perspectives (London:  T&T Clark, 2011), pp. 121-134.

Other Select Publications

‘John M Hull’ In Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Volume 12) (2016).

‘Towards a Liberation Theology of Indigenous Minority Language Groups: A Case Study on the Welsh Language’. Practical Theology, 9.1 (2016).

‘Christian Salvations in a Multi-Faith World: Challenging the Cult of Normalcy’ In Hannah Bacon, Wendy Dossett and Steve Knowles (eds), Alternative Salvations: Engaging the Sacred and the Secular (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) pp. 121-131.

‘No Salvation without the Church: Interfaith Praxes in the Company of Pope Francis’. Practical Theology 7.4 (2014) pp. 294-304.

‘Transforming Able-Bodied Normativity: The Wounded Christ and Human Vulnerability’. Irish Theological Quarterly 78.2 (2013) pp. 231-243.

‘Response to David Clough’ In Bacon, H. and Morris, W. with Knowles, S. (eds), Transforming Exclusion: Engaging Faith Perspectives (London: T&T Clark, 2011) pp.94-98.

‘Church as Sign and Alternative: Disabled People in the Churches’. Journal of Religion, Disability & Health, 14.1 (2010) pp.47-59.

Qualifications

BA (Hons) (Birmingham), PhD (Birmingham), PGCertHE (Liverpool), FHEA.