Events
UPCOMING EVENTS: FALL 2023
Bioethics- Brown Bag Discussion Meetings (Hybrid)
Moderated by: Harrison Lee
Meetings are held from 12:15-1:00 pm ever other Friday in a hybrid form (Teams and in-person) to discuss current issues, research, and topics in the bioethics field. The first meeting will take place on Friday, October 6th on the second floor of Morrison Hall. Any faculty are welcome to join. For more information, or to receive an invitation to the meeting, email Harrison Lee at harrison_lee1@baylor.edu.
Friday, Nov. 17, Environmental Humanities Faculty R&R (Relate and Regenerate)
All Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Minor (EHUM) faculty and contributors join us to share coffee and tea while relating and regenerating ideas for teaching, collaboration, and investigation. This event will take place at 2:00PM in the Creekmore Conference Room of the Jones Library.
PREVIOUS EVENTS
Wednesday, Oct. 4, afternoon: Celebration of St. Francis, Patron Saint of Ecology, and Call to Environmental Action
Afternoon of events reflecting upon the varied ecological and theological legacies of St. Francis, along with an Environmental Humanities Open House in the Baylor Community Garden.
Wednesday, September 20, 7:00-8:00PM: Undergraduate Ethics Society Interest Meeting
Tuesday, September 19, 1:00PM: Testing Patience Lecture with Dr. Jennifer Frey
Tuesday, September 12, 4:00PM: Islam, Land, and Justice
EHUM R&R (Relate and Regenerate): September 6
Join us tomorrow for an Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Minor R&R (Relate & Regenerate) session. All EHUM faculty and contributors are invited! Come share coffee and tea while relating and regenerating ideas for teaching, collaboration, and investigation. The session will begin at 2:00 PM in the Creekmore Conference Room, located on the second floor of the Jones Library. To learn more about the Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Minor, click here.
Bioethics Bowl Interest Meeting: August 30
Baylor Community Garden Revival with the SCRAP Initiative: August 26
Did you know Baylor has a community garden? Located at 1701 South 9th Street (at the corner of James Avenue at 9th Street). This year, classes, student groups, and volunteers are reviving the garden as a center of learning, growing, and nourishment for our community—including Waco’s new SCRAP Collective.
Volunteer to come to the garden on August 26 and help us get ready!
To sign up, click here: https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSc2fPUpH41Sny.../viewform
The 2023 conference will offered as a hybrid event, hosted by ITD at Baylor University from June 26-29, 2023.
Registration is now live! Early Bird rates end on May 25th, 2023. Click here to visit the website to learn more.
Theological Inquiry and Christian Ethics Through Training in Psychological Science: May 16th-20th Workshop
After running a successful RFP funded by a John Templeton Foundation grant for our project illuminating theological inquiry and Christian ethics through training in psychological science, principle investigators, Dr. Devan Stahl and Dr. Sarah Schnitker, will host a workshop May 16-20th on Baylor’s campus.
This workshop encompasses five full days of programming, including lectures, panel discussions, small group discussion, independent writing time, as well as consultations with psychology faculty. The workshop will be followed up by twice monthly virtual seminars for all the Phase 1 participants.
To learn more about the project phases, click here: https://ethics.web.baylor.edu/theology-ethics-psychology/project-phases.
Lecture: Disability, Medicine, and Human Flourishing
Thank you for everyone that joined in for Dr. Devan Stahl's guest lectures at Boston College, providing valuable insight into the subjects of disability, medicine, and the subsequent impact on the human ability to flourish. The lecture took place at 4:00 PM Eastern/3:00 PM Central time via Zoom from Boston College.
Bioethics- Brown Bag Discussion Meetings (Virtual)
Moderated by: Caitlin Maples
Meetings are held from 1:00-2:00 pm every other Friday via Zoom to discuss current issues, research, and topics in the bioethics field. Any faculty are welcome to join. For more information, or to receive an invitation to the meeting, email Caitlin Maples at caitlin_maples1@baylor.edu.
2023 National Bioethics Bowl- Boston, MA (April 15)
Our undergraduate Bioethics Bowl team attended the 2023 National Bioethics Bowl competition on April 15. The National Bioethics Bowl is an annual tournament which brings teams from colleges and universities around the country to discuss ethical challenges in biomedicine and technology.
For more information, you can visit the 2023 National Bioethics Bowl website: https://cssh.northeastern.edu/ethics/national-bioethics-bowl/
Guest Ethics Lecture: "The Power of Positive Thinking"
Dr. Eric Wiland, University of Missouri- St. Louis; Friday, March 24 at 3:00pm, Morrison Hall 108
Abstract:
Imagine two people — Felicia and Dolores — whose lives are nearly identical. They both are recently divorced, work as real estate agents, play the clarinet, talk to their respective brothers on the phone regularly, have slightly high blood pressure, travel to the beach twice a year, and so on. Overall, both lives seem pretty good, and there is almost no way their lives differ. Can we safely conclude that they are doing equally well?
Subjectivists (and others) correctly answer: no. After all, Felicia and Dolores may have different attitudes towards these various aspects of their lives. If their attitudes toward these various aspects of their lives differ, then one of them is likely doing better than the other. To compensate for this, suppose further that Felicia and Dolores have exactly the same attitudes towards these various particular aspects of their lives. They thus share all the same specific prudential goods and specific prudential bads. Now if their lives have the same particular elements, and their attitudes toward these elements are likewise the same, then even most subjectivists would likely conclude that they are doing equally well. After all, doesn’t their well-being supervene upon the various facts of their lives and their attitudes toward these various facts?
Maybe not. For Felicia might view her overall situation as good for her, while Dolores might not. That is, two people might assess each element of her life in the same way, and yet draw very different conclusions about how things ‘add up’. Thus we can distinguish between a person’s many judgments about the myriad particular prudential goods and bads in their life, and a person’s overall judgment about their well-being.
Now, it is possible that your assessment of the quality of your own life makes absolutely no direct difference to the actual quality of your life. Perhaps the well-being of Felicia and Dolores is, in fact, the same, and their global attitudes toward their own lives are evaluatively irrelevant. But I doubt it. If our well- being depends at all upon our attitudes towards the particular elements of our lives, then, it seems, it also depends upon our global attitudes towards our overall lives. But how does it so depend?
One (rare) view about this is Wayne Sumner’s. He holds that thinking (upon careful reflection) that your life is going well is a necessary condition for it to be going well. But that’s too strong. A person might be doing very well despite not making such a judgment under careful reflection. But Sumner is, I think, on the right track. Thinking that your life is going well makes some sort of difference.
Another view comes from Frugé, who argues that people have different desires about how various prudential goods add up, and that these desires determine how the value of the prudential goods in fact add up. This is, by my lights, an improvement over Sumner. But I seriously doubt that most people in fact have the “aggregative attitudes” putatively playing the normative role Frugé identifies. Frugé’s suggestion, which might be correct as far as it goes, says nothing about cases like Felicia’s, who thinks that things are going well for her, but has no recherché desire whose content is about how various types of goods and bads are to be weighed against each other.
Instead I will argue that judging that your life is good typically intensifies the prudential value of the various prudential goods in your life. Just as an intensifying reason for action and a contributory reason for action play different roles in shaping what you have overall reason to do, so too your judgment about the quality of your own life and the particular prudential goods/bads in your life play different roles in shaping your overall well-being. Thanks to Raz and Dancy, we now know not to mistake an intensifying reason for a contributing reason. Likewise, we shouldn’t mistake the prudential role played by your global judgment about your own well-being with the prudential role played by the particular goods and bads in your life. They each play different roles.
This sets me up to argue that if you are otherwise doing well, and you correctly judge that things overall are indeed going well for you, then things are going better for you than they would be if instead you were in the dark about the quality of your life. It’s good for you to know that your life is going well. It makes your life even better.
I also argue that thinking that things are going badly for you intensifies how bad the prudential bads in your life are, thereby making your life worse. Even so, there are some differences between the good case and the bad case: while knowing that your life is going well has no intrinsically bad features, and is better for you than merely believing it’s going well, knowing that your life is going badly is arguably better for you than is merely believing that it’s going badly – this if knowledge is a prudential good.
I look at a few death-bed cases (Ivan Ilyich, Ludwig Wittgenstein) which raise interesting points, but also caution against easy generalizations.
I deal with a bunch of objections, allowing me to clarify what here I have only roughly sketched.
I conclude that the quality of your life is not just something that happens to you; rather, if you become aware of how well your life is going, you can become even better off. The goodness of your life is thus not just some objective fact about you — like your height — completely unrelated to your thoughts about it. Rather, as a self-conscious being, how well you are depends, at least in part, upon what you now make of your life. It’s a tired cliché, but there’s a power in positive thinking.
Church Music Book Launch
A celebratory symposium and virtual book launch featuring monographs from two of Baylor's 2018 Church Music Ph.D. graduates: Dr. Nathan Myrick and Dr. Marcell Steuernagel. Featuring a panel of congregational music, religion, and ethics scholars moderated by Dr. Monique Ingalls.
April 20, 2021
Sponsored by the Baylor Center for Christian Music Studies in conjunction with the Baylor Ethics in the Professions Research Group, Mercer University, and Southern Methodist University.
Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer's Disease
Baylor University's Medical Ethics and Humanities Seminar Series: "Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer’s Disease” - A Conversation with Dr. Stephen Post.
April 14, 2021
Sponsored by Baylor University's Ethics Initiative, the Medical Humanities Program, Pre-Health Programs, and the Institute for Studies of Religion