Moral Compass Lecture by Professor Luke Bretherton
Behind the technological, political and cultural challenges of our time lies a deeper struggle: a struggle over the meaning and purpose of human life. In his lecture Christian Humanism and the Future of Democracy, Bretherton explores what traditions of Christian humanism can contribute in this context.
At the official opening of the Moral Compass Centre, Professor Luke Bretherton will deliver the inaugural Moral Compass Lecture, entitled Christian Humanism and the Future of Democracy.
The Purpose of Human Life
Behind the technological, political and cultural challenges of our time lies a deeper struggle: a struggle over the meaning and purpose of human life. Human life itself is under threat. For many people, simply making ends meet and building a decent, dignified life has already become a struggle.
Against this backdrop, Bretherton identifies two interconnected crises: a crisis of human agency and a crisis of institutional imagination. Technology, economic forces and increasingly impersonal institutions are taking over people's capacity to act. People are losing the ability to shape their shared lives. This fosters alienation, division and despair. In this lecture, Bretherton explores what traditions of Christian humanism can contribute in response to these challenges.
Rediscovering Traditions
This requires a critical rediscovery and reconstruction of these traditions, which place the humanity of Christ and the understanding of human beings as created in the image of God (imago Dei) at their centre. This perspective offers a way to challenge views that reduce human beings to autonomous individuals, expressions of group identity, products of technological forces, or units of economic and social administration. From the perspective of Christian humanism, human beings flourish through relationships and through practices of solidarity, care, mutual responsibility and collective action.
Participatory Democracy
The lecture examines how this perspective can take concrete institutional shape through participatory democracy. Participatory democracy aims to cultivate people capable of building solidarity across differences, enabling strangers to become neighbours within just and generous forms of shared life. Achieving this requires both a vision of the good life and an understanding of the material and social conditions that make pursuing it possible. It calls for attention not only to the cultivation of virtue, but also to the political economy and institutions through which virtue is nurtured and sustained.
About the Speaker
Professor Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and Director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life.
