The 2022 William H. Jellema Lecture: Living in the Story

Kyla Ebels Duggan will deliver the 2022 Jellema Lecture .

Lecture Abstract:

Christian faith is not best understood as the conclusion of an argument. All valuing attitudes—attitudes like admiration, reverence, respect, awe, and love—have this in common. We do not and cannot reason to these sorts of attitude as we can reason to beliefs. Rather than an argument, we have a story that we seek to live inside. This has important implications for the kind of answer we should expect to be able to give in response to challenges to, and doubts about, our faith. It also makes us vulnerable to the possibility that the stories in which we are living can become corrupted or displaced by competing stories. When this happens, we can lose our ability to think clearly and well about what it makes sense to care about and to do.

About the Lecturer:

Kyla Ebels-Duggan is a professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. She works on contemporary issues in moral and political philosophy, and on the history of these fields, within a broadly Kantian tradition. She is interested in how to understand our entitlement to, and responsibility for, acting on our own normative judgements on the one hand, and our dependence on, and reasons for deferring to, others' judgements on the other. She is a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education. 

This event will be recorded and uploaded to Calvin's youtube channel.

Lecture sponsored by the William H. Jellema Lecture endowment, Calvin Philosophy Department, The William H. Jellema Chair in Christian Philosophy, and the Calvin Academy for Lifelong Learning.