Conversations That Matter: "Trapped in our Jeans?"
"Trapped in our Jeans? The Role of Genes in Determining Our Self"
The Notre Dame Science and Religion Initiative and the Office of Life and Human Dignity will host a free, three-part webinar series through spring 2022. This series will consider various scientific and theological perspectives about what it means to be human.
Featured panelists include:
Paul Scherz - Associate Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics, Catholic University of America
Paul Scherz is an Associate Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. He also co-directs the joint Catholic Clinical Ethics program with Georgetown University’s Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and is an Advisory Fellow at Duquesne University's Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law. He is the author of Science and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2019) and co-editor of The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well (Notre Dame, 2020). His forthcoming book, Tomorrow’s Troubles: Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance (Georgetown), examines the role of risk in contemporary culture.
Chris Baglow - Director, Science & Religion Initiative, University of Notre Dame
Chris Baglow’s leadership of the Science & Religion Initiative involves the creation and direction of programs that assist Catholic leaders in bringing the Catholic faith and modern science into dialogue for the sake of the New Evangelization. Chris is from New Orleans, Louisiana. He graduated from Franciscan University in 1990, and immediately began a career in Catholic theological education that has spanned high-school, undergraduate, graduate and seminary teaching. After completing his M.A. at the University of Dallas (1996) and his Ph.D. at Duquesne University (2000), Chris was Junior Professor of Theology at St. Joseph Seminary College (2000-2003), the Sue Ellen Canizaro Chair at Our Lady of Holy Cross College (2003-2009) and Professor of Theology at Notre Dame Seminary (2009-2018). In 2005 he began his research in science and religion, and in 2009 published the first high-school textbook on the topic, Faith, Science and Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge. From 2011-2014 Baglow directed the Templeton-funded Steno Learning Program in Faith and Science for Catholic Secondary Educators (SLP), a week-long seminar experience for Catholic science and religion teachers.
Christine Rosen - Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia
Christine Rosen is senior writer at Commentary magazine and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. She is also a senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.
Her books include Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford University Press, 2004); My Fundamentalist Education (PublicAffairs, 2005); and The Extinction of Experience (W.W. Norton, forthcoming).
Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Democracy Journal, Prospect, Hedgehog Review, MIT Technology Review, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and she is a frequent guest on radio and television programs. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University. She also teaches martial arts and holds a second-degree black belt in aikido. She lives with her children in Washington, D.C..