Religion and bioethics

In our globalized and multicultural societies, religions play an important role since they profoundly shape the different cultures. Given this phenomenon, the traditional modern strategy of managing conflicts by separating public and private sphere doesn’t work anymore. Indeed, many authors have suggested that we live in post-secular societies, in which religious attitudes and secular values are closely interconnected and influence each other. Also for this reason, it has become more and more evident that bioethical issues cannot be dealt with just with principles and rules, because they always involve dimensions of meaning. Since the most important sources of meaning for the life of many people come from religious traditions, reference to religions also in bioethics is inescapable. Yet, the more such reference and consideration of religions become inevitable, the more bioethics must create the conditions for a fruitful dialogue among these traditions and between religious and secular persons. The lecture series explicitly identifies the basis for this dialogue in the anthropological dimension. Such strategy seems to make possible and justify, better than other approaches, the link between bioethics and religions. Contents of the course include: (1) a critical analysis of different approaches on the relationship between bioethics and religion; (2) a sociological perspective on the interaction between religious attitudes and secular values; (3) anthropological presuppositions and bioethical implications of important Western and Eastern religious traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. As to the methods, the course will combine lectures, group discussions and workshops. Since the course will have participants from different religious traditions, group discussions will be of particular interest and a source of reciprocal enrichment. All course activities and materials are in English.