Annual Harold T. Shapiro Lecture on Ethics, Science, and Technology featuring Charles Camosy, Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University

There is perhaps no more important value than fundamental human equality. And yet, despite large percentages of people affirming the value, the resources available to explain and defend the basis for such equality are few and far between. Telling personal stories like those of Jahi McMath, Terri Schiavo, and Alfie Evans, Charles Camosy, a noted bioethicist and theologian, uses an engaging style to show how the influence of secularized medicine is undermining fundamental human equality in the broader culture. In particular, he will sound the alarm about the next population to fall if we stay on our current trajectory: dozens of millions of human beings with dementia. Heeding this alarm, Camosy argues, means doing two things. First, making urgent and genuine attempts to dialogue with a secularized culture which cannot see how it is undermining one of its most foundational values. Second, religious communities which hold the Imago Dei sacred must mobilize their existing institutions (and create new ones) to care for a new set of human beings our throwaway culture may deem non-persons.