Luke Bretherton (Oxford): The Struggle to be Human
Date: Monday 16 November
Time: 17:00
Venue: Schwarzman Centre, Lecture Theatre
This inaugural lecture approaches Christian humanism as a historically contested and evolving tradition of theologically grounded reflection on the nature and purposes of human life and the political conditions of its flourishing. Through a critical reconstruction of this tradition, the lecture explores the relationship between conceptions of the human person and competing imaginaries of political order, with a particular focus on the material and intellectual histories that shape Christian humanist conceptions of freedom, personhood, and political association. It concludes by examining how and why Christian humanism comes to envision participatory democracy as its institutional embodiment, and asking how diverse expressions of democracy might form the capacity for common action and sustain forms of association through which strangers become neighbours and human flourishing is realised.
