Forthcoming events...

Anscombe Bioethics Centre - Symposium & Book Launch - Blackfriars, Oxford

In Search of a Universal Ethic: A new look at the Natural Law

The Anscombe Centre is delighted to announce a symposium on this contribution to the current and ongoing debate on natural law, and the launch of this first English language edition, which is available from CTS. This symposium will also launch the title mentioned above, a new book from the International Theological Commission.

Speakers will briefly introduce chapters from the book and lead subsequent discussions.

Tuesday 22nd May, 2pm - 5pm at Blackfriars Hall.

Participants include:

• Prof. David Albert Jones (Anscombe Bioethics Centre),
• Dr Pia Matthews (St Mary’s University College Twickenham),
• Rev Dr Robert Ombres OP (Blackfriars, Oxford & the Pontifical University of
• St Thomas Aquinas, Rome),
• Rev John O’Connor OP (Blackfriars, Oxford) and
• Rt Rev Mgr Michael Sharkey

Vist www.bioethics.org.uk to learn more about The Anscombe Centre's work and vision.

For further information concerning this event, contact: admin@bioethics.org.uk or call 01865 610 212.

Anscombe Bioethics Centre - International day conference on Human Dignity in Healthcare - Blackfriars, Oxford

Keynote Speaker: Rev. Prof. Daniel P. Sulmasy

Kilbride-Clinton Professor of Medicine and Ethics, University of Chicago
Associate Director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medicine, University of Chicago
Member of President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues

Other speakers and presenters to include:

• Prof. David Albert Jones (Anscombe Centre)
• Prof. Christopher McCrudden (Queen’s University Belfast)
• Dr Sylvie de Kermadec (OB/GYN Paris, & former
• Director of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation)
• Mr Ben Bano (Director at Telos Training Ltd.)

The cost of this event is £30 (£15 conc.), which includes refreshments and a sandwich lunch. Visit www.bioethics.org.uk to book your place.

Co-sponsored by The Anscombe Bioethics Centre and Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford.

For further information about this conference contact: admin@bioethics.org.uk, or call 01865 610 212.

A Vision for Life: The Spirit of Catholic Theology - Buckfast Abbey, Devon

A five-day summer school (Monday June 25th to Friday June 29th) aimed at undergraduates and young adults seeking to make sense of theology and integrate it into a sustainable vision of Catholic life. A team of Dominican friars and sisters will guide participants through a comprehensive overview of the Catholic Faith taking the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as our guide. Over the course of the week we will explore themes such as: The Trinity, creation and science, the human person and the meaning of life, moral theology, grace, the Incarnation, how to read the Bible, redemption, the Church, and sacraments and much more. Set in the beautiful grounds of Buckfast Abbey on the edge of Dartmoor, participants will be able to share in the liturgy of the Benedictine monastic community, to walk in peace and quiet on the hills, to enjoy some time of silent reflection as well as lively discussion. Through the generosity of the Abbot and monks of Buckfast, as well as of other sponsors, the cost for full board and lodging will be only £120. Feedback from last years participants: ‘This week has been amazing for developing my knowledge of theology and I have thoroughly enjoyed it!’ ‘Really excellent – balancing prayer and study, with space for reflection: structure was perfect and not too intense.’ For further information contact Br. Nicholas Crowe OP at studyweeks@english.op.org more >>

Stanley Hauerwas - Special Lecture - Blackfriars, Oxford

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School. He is one of the leading theologians engaging with the role of Christianity in secular society and the author of many books, of which the most influential include: 'The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics' (1983); 'Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular' (1994); and 'A Better Hope: Resources for a church confronting capitalism, democracy and postmodernity' (2000). In recent years he has also developed a trenchant critique of the contemporary research university in books and has published on this topic ' That State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God' (2007). more >>

Events from the past year...

Christianity and Globalization: Two Sets of Challenges - Garden Quad Auditorium, St John's College, Oxford

The John Henry Newman Annual Lecture - to be given by Prof. Romano Prodi. The Catholic Halls of Oxford, Blackfriars, Campion Hall and St Benet's, are grateful to the Catholic Herald for their generous sponsorship of this event. more >>

The Gift of Desire & the Fear of Loss: Psychological, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives - Blackfriars, Oxford

An Aquinas Institute colloquium in honour of Fergus Kerr OP. Speakers so far confirmed: Prof. John Webster, Prof. John Cottingham, Prof. Jeff Green, Dr Peter Hunter OP, Dr Fergus Kerr OP Invitations will be sent out in January for this event. Registration (to include buffet lunch): Waged £10; Unwaged £5. To request an invitation as a lecturer or postgraduate student of Theology, Philosophy, or Psychology, please email using an academic email address to pa-regent@bfriars.ox.ac.uk

The Veritas Forum 2012: Losing Interest? - St John's College, Oxford

Imagine a financial system without debt. Students, house-buyers, consumers, companies, countries -- we all use interest-bearing debt. But what does it do to us? Notably, all three Abrahamic religions contain some form of prohibition on the taking of interest on debt - what does this mean for today? Could we live without interest-bearing debt? In this year's Veritas Forum, Dr Paul Mills will offer a proposal for a financial system that uses far less -- or even no -- interest bearing debt.

Professor Colin Mayer (Said) and Dr Jenny Corbett (Nissan Institute) will respond.

The Veritas Forum 2012
7.30pm, Thursday 3 May
St John's College, Garden Auditorium

If you would like further information please click more and follow the subsequent links.

Just War Theory and Its Alternatives - Campion Hall, Oxford

The Master & Community have pleasure in inviting you to
the Martin D’Arcy Memorial Lecture

Revd. Prof. John Langan SJ
(Georgetown University)
"Just War Theory and Its Alternatives"

The Lecture Room, Campion Hall
5pm, Wednesday 2nd May (2nd Week)

If you would like to attend, RSVP as soon as possible to:

master@campion.ox.ac.uk
01865 286100

Ransom, Redemption, and the Sign of Jonah: The crucifixion in patristic theology - Blackfriars, Oxford

A special lecture by Dr Nicholas Lombardo OP offered with support from the Templeton Foundation. more >>

Boredom and Its Discontents: Making sense of a modern phenomenon with Aquinas' theory of the emotions - Blackfriars, Oxford

A Special lecture by Dr Nicholas Lombardo OP offered with support from the Templeton Foundation. Fr Nicholas Lombardo is a Dominican friar of the St Joseph's Province in the United States. He is Assistant Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Catholic University of America, and author of 'The Logic of Desire - Aquinas on Emotion' (forthcoming from CUA Press).

Aquinas and the Arabs: II - Blackfriars, Oxford

Speakers: Prof David Burrell (Notre Dame) on '‘Aquinas and Islamic Philosophers’; and Prof. Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute): '‘Thomas’s use of the term ‘continuatio’ and its Arabic origins’. To request an invitation to this event, please email pa-regent@bfriars.ox.ac.uk. more >>

Aquinas Colloquium: Participation and Analogy - Blackfriars, Oxford

Speakers to include: Prof. David Burrell (Notre Dame) on Desire and the Semantics of God-talk: Beyond a ‘negative/positive’ Polarity in Analogical Language'; Prof. Rudi te Veld (Tilburg) on title 'Questions on analogy/analogia entis'; Prof. Janet Soskice (Cambridge) on 'Naming God in Philo, Augustine and Aquinas'; and Dr Stephen Mulhall (Oxford). To request an invitation to this event, please email pa-regent@bfriars.ox.ac.uk.

Aquinas Colloquium - Participation and Analogy

Saturday 3^rd March 2012

Blackfriars Hall

(Programme subject to change)

Scripture and Tradition in Relation to Revelation and to the Church - Oxford

Eduardo J. Echeverria, S.T.L., Ph.D. speaks on Dutch Reformed Theologian, G. C. Berkouwer's ecumenical dialogue with Catholicism on the dogmatic topic of "Scripture and Tradition in relation to Revelation and to the Church" before, during, and after the Council. He seeks to clarify the great issues at stake in the continuing Sacred Scripture and Tradition debate.

Recovering Economics as a Moral Science - Blackfriars, Oxford

The current economic and financial crises may have multiple causes, but fundamental to good economic policy should be a coherent understanding of economics. There is good to reason to think that economic theory is itself in crisis and that arriving at a better understanding of economics is a necessary goal of long-term prosperity.

The Blackfriars symposium, sponored by the Hall's Las Casas Institute together with the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales and CAFOD, asks: How is economics to be re-envisioned?

The ambition of modern economic theory to resemble the natural sciences has excluded aspects of economic life that have no reliable parallel in nature, and, therefore, cannot be understood with the aid of methodologies designed for the natural sciences. The resulting reclassification of economic phenomena has built a surrogate reality, but the theorems and hypotheses constructed upon lack adaquate explanatory or predictive power.

The exclusion of the moral quality of economic phenomena in the name of scientific objectivity has produced a reductionist and determinist dsicipline whose protagonist, the utility maximizing agent, bears little resemblance to the ontological composition of the human being. It eliminates from consideration the apparently ineradicable human need for transcendence together with the virtues with the aid of which humans struggle to respond to this need. The symposium addresses the following major issues:

l. What is the proper province of economics, how is it constituted, and how is it represented in economic theory?

ll. What is the role of moral considerations in economic life?

lll. How can the philosophical foundations of economics be rebuilt in a manner that does not exclude the moral issues that inhere in economic phenomena? How can it be made as open as the indeterminate flow that characterizes it?

Speakers at the symposium will include:

Prof. Peter Rona ( Senior Research Fellow of Blackfriars Hall and Honorary Professor of International Law, Eotvos University of Budapest; Member of the Supervisory Board of the Central Bank of Hungary)

Prof. Stefano Zamagni (Vice director of the Bologna Centre, Senior Adjunct Professor of International Economics, John Hopkins University; Professor of Economics, University of Bologna)

Prof. Deirdre McCloskey (Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago)

Prof. Valpy Fitzgerald (Professor of International Development Finance, Oxford University)

Prof. Stuart Kauffman (Distinguished Professor, Biochemistry and Mathematics, University of Vermont)

Prof. Peter Csermely (Semmelweis University of Budapest)

Prof. Albino Barrera O.P. (Professor of Economics and Theology, Providence College, RI)

Dr Aloys Wijngaards (Radbout University)

The event will be part chaired by Frances Cairncross, Warden of Exeter College, Oxford

Participation in the event is by invitation only. Blackfriars is grateful to the Tablet and Pastoral Review, CAFOD, the Mallinckrodt Foundation and Stone King LLP for their support of this event.

Annual 2012 Las Casas Lecture - Blackfriars, Oxford

Smart Globalization: The Case for a Robust and Creative Distributive Justice

by Albino Barrera, O.P. PhD
Providence College, USA

Contemporary globalization consists of two mutually reinforcing developments, namely, global economic integration and the rise of the knowledge economy. It is as transformative as the Industrial Revolution was for its era. Like previous epochal changes, the current massive shift in the economic terrain is precipitating corresponding changes in ethical thinking and practice. In particular, given the importance of human capital development in a knowledge economy, long-term allocative efficiency is now a function of equity in the near term. Unfortunately, market failures prevent such convergence of efficiency and equity in practice. Extra-market initiatives from government, NGOs, and social enterprises can provide the necessary corrections. Globalization can be a win-win proposition for all parties, but only if we are responsive in adjusting our standards of distributive justice and then acting accordingly.

The full text of Fr Barrera's lecture can be found here.

Annual Aquinas Lecture - Jean Luc Marion Unable to travel to Oxford - Blackfriars, Oxford

This year's Aquinas lecturer, Prof Jean-Luc Marion, has contacted us to say that he is now longer able to travel to Oxford because of health-issues. Blackfriars is currently exploring with Prof. Marion an option to present his lecture by video. Further news will be posted when it becomes available. Prof. Marion is one of the world's leading Catholic philosophers writing today. A former student of Derrida, he is Professor of Philosophy at the Univeristy of Paris - Sorbonne - and Visiting Professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. His many books include 'God without Being', 'The Visible and the Revealed', 'Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness', and 'On Descartes' Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought'. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including in 1992 the the Grand Prix de philosophie de l'Académie française, of which he is a member.

The Logic of the Gift - one-day colloquium - Blackfriars, Oxford

Recent papal teaching on modern economic life, and on the pursuit of wealth within economic growth and development, has questioned the place of the profit motive within the classical understanding of economic agency and its widespread characterization as morally praiseworthy to the exclusion of any more complex account of virtue in business or commerce. It has further questioned the degree to which the well-being of civic society can be secured through the transformation of different institutions which contribute to human flourishing into market-places for the sale and purchase of services. Pope Benedict XVI, in particular, has written of the dangers attendant when economic theory and practice neglect what he terms the logic of the gift. “In commercial relationships the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity” (Caritas in Veritate, 36). “Gift by its nature goes beyond merit, its rule is that of superabundance” (Caritas in Veritate, 34). The full import of the encyclical bears more detailed consideration. It raises questions about how gifts, both actual and perceptual, received and donated, enter into cultural and religious understanding of the self in relation to others. The importance of the gift was central to much early Christian theology, and to much twentieth-century anthropology, but to what extent can insights from these disciplines inform contemporary theory and politics? Does papal teaching in this respect map neatly or at all on to current British political debate on the big society? Study of these questions was given impetus by a symposium on Caritas in Veritate entitled “The Logic of Gift,” held at Rome in February 2011 hosted by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and co-sponsored by the John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. more >>

The Modern State and the Kingdom of God - Blackfriars, Oxford

The colloquium will draw together lawyers, politicians, and theologians. We will examine key features of the modern state, the rule of law and the participation of the people, as we seek to understand the state and interpret it through the lens of the kingdom of God.

A Place for Faith Schools? - Blackfriars, Oxford

Faith schooling has come under serious attack in recent years, and stands accused of contributing to social fragmentation, hidden selectivity, and of being the improper beneficiary of public funds in a secular society. Others see faith schools as integral to the human rights of believers who should be free educate their children in their own religious tradition, and as contributing to excellence and diversity with the sector. This colloquium at Blackfriars jointly sponsored by the Las Casas Institute and the Christian Muslim Forum focuses on schooling in the different Christian and different Muslim traditions. Speakers include Prof. Richard Pring (Oxford University); Dr Musharraf Hassain Al-Azhari OBE (the Karimia Institute); Shaykh Abdul Mubad (The Islamic Academy);  Maurice Irfan Coles; Dr. Liam Gearon (Oxford University); and Dr Julia Ipgrave (Warwick University).

Anscombe Memorial Lecture - Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Embryo Debate - Oxford

more >>

A Vision for Life: The Spirit of Catholic Theology - Buckfast Abbey, Devon

A five-day summer school (Monday July 11 to Friday July 15) aimed at undergraduates seeking to make sense of theology and integrate it into a sustainable vision of the Catholic life.

Is there a Catholic way to read the Bible? Do Catholics beleive in the God of the Philosophers? How does God make Himself known? What good is the Church? Does science contradict religion? How should I live in a secular world? A team of Dominican friars will guide participants through these and other questions in a comprehensive overview of the Catholic Faith.

Earliest Proponents of Universal Human Rights? Theological Anthropologies of Calvin and Las Casas in Context - Oxford

The Las Casas Institute welcomes Dr. Paul Lim (Ph.D. Cambridge) to Oxford for a talk open to those in all Departments and Colleges. Paul Lim is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity and Affiliate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Lim is author and editor of three books: In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter's Ecclesiology in Context (Brill, 2004); The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008); and Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012 forthcoming). His talk on Las Casas and Calvin is based on his future book on the Encounter of the Religious and Racial Other in Early Modern Europe. more >>

The Eucharist and Poverty - Blackfriars, Oxford

A lecture by Angel Mendez OP. Angel's book 'The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist' has been nominated and shortlisted for the 2011 Ramsey Prize.