Join us for Professor Luke Bretherton's inaugural lecture examining the struggle over the meaning and purpose of human life.
Description
Beneath the technological, political, and cultural challenges of our time lies a deeper contest: a struggle over the meaning and purpose of human life. At the same time, we face existential challenges to the material and social conditions that sustain human life. Taking this context as its point of departure, this inaugural lecture argues that contemporary societies confront two intertwined crises: a crisis of human agency and a crisis of institutional imagination. In response, it offers a critical retrieval and reconstruction of Christian humanism as a theological and political vision of human flourishing as fundamentally relational and participatory. We become more fully human through practices of solidarity, care, mutual responsibility, and common action. The lecture then explores how participatory democracy might give institutional form to this vision: forming persons capable of solidarity across difference and enabling strangers to become neighbours within just and generous forms of common life.
Event Details
Date and Time: Monday 16 November, 17:00 (followed by drinks reception)
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Oxford
Registration
Registration is free.
More details on how to register will be provided soon.
About the Speaker
Professor Luke Bretherton is the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and director of the McDonald Center for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life. Prior to Oxford he was the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke University. Before joining Duke in 2012, he taught at King's College London.
