Human Dignity

John Loughlin is a Senior Research Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Politics, Cardiff University. He previously held the Chair of European Politics at Cardiff and was an Affiliated Lecturer of Politics at the University of Cambridge. A former Cistercian monk, he has published volumes with Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury, and Routledge. He is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences and of the Learned Society of Wales and has advised several European governments and international institutions.

At a time when answering the question of what it means to be human is more and more urgent, the idea of ‘human dignity’ is increasingly offered as an influential response, but what does it mean? John Loughlin’s book provides a welcome assessment of current debates on what the concept means from a Catholic perspective, tracing its origins in Imago Dei and its subsequent complex and contested history, through to contemporary debates on its meaning and functions. The book is a timely and penetrating reassessment of this critical concept from a scholar immersed in the diversity of Catholic thought but sensitive also to other religious and non-religious narratives that challenge that tradition. A tour de force.

• PrefaceIntroduction1. Human Beings Made 'In the Image and Likeness of God — The Biblical Breakthrough2. The New Testament Understanding of the ‘Imago Dei’3. The Patristic and Mediaeval Theological Development of ‘Image and Likeness4.The Renaissance Vision of the Human Being5. The Reformation: The Collapse of the Christian Humanist Synthesis?6. The Enlightenment and the Rise of Secular Modernity7. Romanticism, Reaction, and the Fragmentation of Modern Concepts of Human Dignity8. Twentieth-Century Challenges and the renewal of the Catholic Understanding of Human Dignity9. Human Dignity in Contemporary Ethical Conflicts — A Concluding ReflectionReferencesIndex