John Bowlin, Robert L. Stuart Associate Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, will give a public lecture at YDS on Thursday, February 16th. The lecture, titled “Dignity and Domination: A Thomistic Sketch,” will be held in Niebuhr Hall at 5:30 p.m.
Dr. Bowlin’s most recent book, Tolerance among the Virtues (Princeton 2016), was featured in in a recent New York Times article, “How to be Civil in an Uncivil World.” His lecture will advance a civic project that puts human dignity first, and by virtue of that priority, considers freedom from domination a primary feature of political liberty. We live in an age that too often denies the basic human dignity of persons. Consider the persistence of child sex trafficking, judicial torture, militarized policing, the mistreatment of immigrants, and the mass incarceration of black men. Consider as well, the difficulty philosophers and theologians have had identifying a source of human dignity that includes all human persons and that provides enough normative content to specify what dignity might actually demand once it has been recognized.
What can be said in reply? What theological warrants can be offered in defense of human dignity? What does human dignity require once it has been given a theological defense? And what would the civic project of Christianity look like if it took that defense seriously, if it attended to those requirements? John Bowlin will take up these questions in conversation with Aquinas’s treatment of the natural law and Augustine’s remarks on the lust to dominate.