Luke Bretherton: “Democracy, the Commons, and the Struggle to be Human”

Thursday, September 4, 2025
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Andrews Auditorium, Geddes Hall

Luke Bretherton is the Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. His primary areas of research, supervision, and teaching focus on the intersection of systematic, moral, and political theology, while at the same time making connections between these and social scientific, critical, and other ways of analyzing contemporary social, economic, and political life. His latest book is A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

This lecture reframes democracy as a form of “commoning”—a participatory social practice through which communities co-create, govern, and sustain shared resources, from ecosystems to cultural practices like games to forms of shared knowledge like scientific methods. Drawing on the history of struggles against enclosure of the commons, and a range of other theological and non-theological frames of reference, it outlines how what John Paul II called “authentic democracy” is grounded in the commons rather than merely in electoral mechanisms or bureaucratic procedures. It diagnoses the erosion of the commons—through privatization, commodification, and technocracy—and the ways this undermines human agency and ecological sustainability. Community organizing is explored as a practical embodiment of commoning, cultivating relational power, mutual responsibility, and solidarity across difference. Such democratic practices resist technocratic, ideological, and identitarian reductions of politics, restoring politics as the shared negotiation of a common life. It concludes by challenging universities to defend and tend the knowledge commons and cultivate democratic agency through their research and teaching.