Featuring
Rev. J. Bryan Hehir
Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government
Click here to watch the video of “Beyond the ‘Challenge of Peace’: Pastoral Letter for Our Day” (March 25)
Click here to watch the video of "The Hardest Case: The Politics and Ethics of Proliferation” (March 26)
Rev. J. Bryan Hehir is an internationally renowned theologian who specializes in Catholic social teaching and international relations. He is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
In previous years, Hehir served as president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, a network of more than 1,400 social-service agencies across the country. In the 1980s, as policy advisor to the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops in Washington, D.C., he was the chief architect of the bishops’ influential statement on nuclear weapons,“The Challenge of Peace.”
Hehir also has served as the Joseph P. Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics and as a professor in religion and society at Harvard Divinity School.
He has written extensively on ethics and foreign policy, Catholic social ethics, and the role of religion in world politics and American society. His publications include The Moral Measurement of War: A Tradition of Continuity and Change; Military Intervention and National Sovereignty; Catholicism and Democracy; Social Values and Public Policy: A Contribution from a Religious Tradition; and The Moral Dimension in the Use of Force.
Hehir is the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1984) and honorary degrees from more than 25 institutions.
The annual Hesburgh Lectures were established by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in honor of the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., president emeritus of Notre Dame.
Previous Hesburgh lecturers:
- Congressman Lee Hamilton, former vice-chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks & former chairman/ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs
- Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University
- Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spellman Rockefeller Professor of Social Political Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School
- Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, The University of Chicago Law School
- Mary Kaldor, Professor of Global Governance & Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics
- Michael Ignatieff, Member of Canadian Parliament and former director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights and Policy, Harvard University
- Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University
- Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University
- Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology and the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University
- Shashi Tharoor, author and former Under-Secretary-General, United Nations
- Stanley Hoffmann, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Harvard University
