All are most welcome to come to Prof. Kevin Vallier's public lecture, which will take place on 6th June 2024 at 5:30pm at the Michael Dummett Lecture Theatre in Christ Church College. Tea, coffee, and biscuits will be available from 5pm.
Prof. Tom Simpson will provide a response to the lecture, which will then be followed by Q&A.
The lecture is jointly sponsored by Magdalen College, Oxford, and the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life.
The title of the lecture is: 'Is the New Catholic Integralism true or false?'
The aim is to explore the arguments and themes of Kevin Vallier’s new book All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (OUP, 2023). The book examines religious anti-liberalism—particularly Catholic integralism, as well as Confucian and Islamic anti-liberalisms—philosophically, theologically, historically, and economically. The lecture will introduce contemporary integralism, offer one argument in its favour, and one argument for why it ultimately must be rejected.
The argument in favour will be the ‘symmetry argument’, which is Chapter 3 of Prof. Vallier's book. The argument against will be a somewhat reworked version of the ‘justice argument’, which is Chapter 6 of the book. The reworking will put more of the focus on the associative and authorisation arguments that come toward the end of the chapter but which Prof. Vallier now sees as the most important ones in terms of offering an internal critique of integralism.
