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• LGBTQ Students in Catholic Schools: Is There a Way Forward? with Cathleen Kaveny

  • When
    7 May 2024
  •  
    7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom

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  The culture wars have found a flash point in Catholic schools. Some people, including bishops, want to prohibit LGBTQ teachers from seeking employment in such schools, because they violate church teaching on sexual morality and gender identity. Other people urge the schools to be more welcoming, citing Pope Francis' injunction that the doors of the church are to be open to everyone. How do we negotiate these tensions in a way that respects the dignity of everyone involved, as well as the mission of Catholic education?

  Cathleen Kaveny is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor at Boston College. The author of four books and over a hundred articles and essays, she focuses on the relationship among law, religion, and morality in American society.

  “So, before you take the religious liberty issue [for example], what people said [was that] we can't respect the religious liberty of everybody. Because that would mean that we were respecting religious traditions that we believe to be false. And we can't respect falsehood. What happened at the Second Vatican Council, and this is key, is they said, that's the wrong question. You're not asking whether you're respecting truthhood or falsehood. The more fundamental question is, are you respecting everyone’s dignity as a searcher for the truth? That's the right question.” 
  

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• Laudato Si, Laudate Deum: Living Pope Francis’ Prophetic Call with Karenna Gore

  • When
    5 Jun 2024
  •  
    7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom

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  Karenna Gore will address Laudato Sí and Laudate Deum in the context of the rights of nature, ecocentric law, and comparative (including Indigenous) viewpoints. Her presentation will situate today’s environmental crisis in this broad context, underlining the importance of Pope Francis’ message.

  Karenna Gore, like her father Al Gore, is a longtime climate activist, concerned about ethics related to our environmental crisis and how they can influence our practical response to this challenge.

  The Center for Earth Ethics was founded to make the changes in policy and culture that are necessary to change to a value system based on longterm well-being of all life.

  As we were exploring reframing climate change as a moral issue in galvanizing faith-based activism about it, we also explored deeply the root causes, as we saw them, of the crisis that we’re in and we discovered that it’s really two root causes.

  One is this illusion that we are separate and superior to the whole rest of nature. The other root cause is the development paradigm/economic growth paradigm — the way that we measure successful societies.
  

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