World-renowned New Testament theologian and former Bishop of Durham is the author of more than eighty books. His latest, the summation of a lifetime’s thinking, looks forward to the glorious renewal of the whole of creation.

A few days before I travel to Oxford to meet New Testament scholar Tom Wright, I receive a WhatsApp message from my sister, a zoologist, from her field site on the shores of Lake Edward in Uganda. In between watching lions and elephants, she has been reading an influential animal ethicist who accuses the Bible of “speciesism” for claiming that humans have immortal souls while animals don’t, reducing the rest of creation to a resource to be exploited by a human race aiming to rise above the shackles of the material world. My sister asks me: does the Bible actually say this – and, if so, where is the chapter and verse?

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