Conference on Defending Human Dignity Through Love

First Things editor Joseph Bottum will be a keynote speaker next month at a major conference on defending human dignity through love:

The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project is proud to collaborate with the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in hosting a major international conference in Rome dedicated to the question, “What is love?”

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Commenting on the purpose of the conference, [John Henry Crosby] said, “Hildebrand defined his heroic battle against Nazism as the ‘struggle for the person’. While the threat of Nazism is gone today, human dignity is as endangered as ever before. We want to contribute to the perennial task of clarifying and defending human dignity, and we want to do so through the lens of love.”

Crosby continued, “We are organizing the conference on the assumption that one cannot make sense of the human person apart from his or her capacity for loving and being loved. Love is the supreme human concern, and we believe, with Hildebrand, that it is impossible to understand the nature of man without understanding the nature or love. But our approach is not only philosophically motivated. There is also a human dimension, which is that we think that a conversation about love is also the most intriguing way of inviting a larger public to participate in our conference.”

For those who can’t afford a plane ticket to Rome, we’ll be posting the video of Bottum’s address here on the First Thoughts blog.