Ethicists today are developing the concepts of Vulnerability and Recognition so as to support more responsible and collaborative societies around the world. Judith Butler, for instance, distinguishes precarity from vulnerability; she sees precarity as the context of a person in need but identifies vulnerability as the fundamental capacity of the human being to be open and responsive to another.
Think of the Good Samaritan parable where the Samaritan, unlike the priest and the levite respond to the precarious, wounded man on the road. The first act of vulnerable people is, then, to recognize the other, especially those overlooked. Many contemporary movements are recognition movements, like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, or the Dalit Movement. Putting these two concepts together, it will be argued, is the work of Brotéria in responding to the world in which we live.
This conference will be held in english.
Building Bridges: three conferences
Brotéria was born in 1902 as a botanic publication, with the intention of contributing to the dissemination of scientific knowledge, but also aiming to fight against the divorce between science and religion. Throughout these past 120 years, building bridges was always one of the fundamental concerns of Brotéria.
Over the last 120 years, building bridges has always been one of Brotéria's major concerns. We chose natural sciences, contemporary art and moral reasoning as a starting point for three conferences. How can religion and the Catholic church be relevant to art, ethics, and science in order to contribute to the development of a fair and human society?
James Keenan SJ
Canisius Chair, Director of the Jesuit Institute and Vice Provost of Global Engagement at Boston College. A Jesuit priest since 1982, he received a licentiate and a doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He has edited or written over 25 books and published over 400 essays, articles, and reviews worldwide. In 2003 Fr. Keenan founded Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC) an international network of more than 1500 Catholic ethicists and subsequently hosted three international and six regional conferences. In 2000, he edited Catholic Ethicists on HIV/AIDS Prevention. In 2015, he wrote University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield) and in 2022, A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (Paulist Press). In 2023 Georgetown University Press, will publish The Moral Life: The Martin D’Arcy Memorial Lectures. In 2019 he received the John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achieve Award from the Society of Christian Ethics and from 2020-2021, he was President of the Society of Christian Ethics.
