All are invited to join Fr. Joseph Selinger, OP, in the Fireplace Room of Aquinas Hall for the next Drinks with Dominicans, for a talk entitled Love, Lust, and Objectification. RSVP to office@holyrosarypdx.org.

We often hear today that lust leads us to objectify people. What does it mean to objectify someone? Does the lustful person really view the other person as a mere object? Or is it more complicated? In this Drinks with Dominicans, Father Joseph will draw from Saint Thomas Aquinas and Edmund Husserl to sketch the relationship between love, lust, and objectification.

Saint Thomas Aquinas was the great 13th century theologian and Doctor of the Church. Unlike many of our modern contemporaries, Aquinas acknowledges the qualitative difference between living creatures and non-living objects. He also acknowledges the qualitative difference between human beings and animals. He uses his understanding of these differences to show how we ought to relate our fellow human beings compared to non-human animals and inanimate objects.

Edmund Husserl was the founder of Phenomenology, an important European school of philosophy. Husserl also highlights the differences between human beings and other creatures/objects and explains how the bodies of human beings are uniquely living bodies compared to other physical bodies. We have a unique relation to the living bodies of others through empathy, a relation that would be altered if we attempted to relate to living bodies in the way we do non-living bodies.

Considering these perspectives, the purpose of this talk is to provide a sketch of what objectification amounts to and provide an ethical interpretation of it in light of the rich Catholic theological tradition.