Tina Beattie is Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Digby Stuart Research Centre for Religion, Society and Human Flourishing at the University of Roehampton in London.
Her research and teaching interests include theology and psychoanalysis, Catholic social teaching and human rights, sacramentality and gender, and theology and art with a particular focus on the Virgin Mary.
She has published a number of academic books and essays, the latest of which is Theology after Postmodernity: Divining the Void – a Lacanian Reading of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Her novel The Last Supper According to Martha and Mary (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 2001) is currently being made into a feature film.
She also writes for the Catholic weekly The Tablet, The Guardian online and various other publications, and she makes frequent contributions to the media, particularly BBC Radio 4 but also to international radio and television networks.
In addition to her academic work, Tina is actively involved in a wide range of activities to do with education and awareness-raising in parishes and communities. She has a keen interest in the role of religion in public life and secular society, which led her to write The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007).
She is a member of the Theological Advisory Group of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, and she has for many years been involved in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue. She had a Presbyterian upbringing in Zambia, but became a Catholic in 1986 when she was living in Harare, Zimbabwe, shortly after the birth of her fourth child.
Tina divides her time between her family home in Bristol and a houseboat in London, where she communes with the geese and the ducks in the ‘edgelands’ of the city, described by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts in their book of the same name as the ‘wilderness’ of an ‘in-between world’ which flourishes on the edges of our urban landscapes.