Faith and Reason: Amity or Enmity? The Life of Faith and the Moral Life

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics cosponsored the Veritas Forum lecture by Professor Robert P. George on Thursday, April 21, 2011. This event – organized by the Veritas Forum – was moderated by Washington University professor S. Joshua Swamidass.

About Robert P. George

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Founder and Director of James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also a Professor of Politics and an associated faculty member of the Department of Philosophy at Princeton. He is a member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. Professor George’s scholarly focus has been on the dignity of the human person and its implications for moral, legal, and political philosophy. He is the author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (1993), In Defense of Natural Law (1999), and The Clash of Orthodoxies (2001). He is the editor of several volumes, including Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays (1992), The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism (1996), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (1996), and Great Cases in Constitutional Law (2000), and co-editor with Jean Bethke Elshtain of The Meaning of Marriage (2005). He is co-author of two recent books: Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday) and Body-Self Dualism and Contemporary Ethical and Political Controversies (Cambridge University Press).

About S. Joshua Swamidass

Department of Immunology and Pathology, Washington University School of Medicine.

Scientist, physician, and orator, Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass is a Laboratory Medicine resident at the Washington University School of Medicine, having earned his MD and Computer Science PhD at the University of California, Irvine. The author of “How Deep is Your Dungeon?,” an artful engagement with the biblical story of Job and the nature of human suffering, he has spent time volunteering in medical projects in Mexico, India, and the United States. As a scientist-christian, he often wonders about the synergies and tensions between faith and science. His current research focuses on designing computational infrastructure (hardware, data, and algorithms) that can help experimental researchers discover and refine novel medicines. In the future, he plans to work as a research professor, teaching and tackling important scientific questions.