Inaugural lecture: The Revd Canon Professor Luke Bretherton

Rethinking what it means to be human in a time of crisis.

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.  

Hosted by the Faculty of Theology and Religion.