Staying Human: Our 2025 Public Talks Series

We are delighted to announce Staying Human, our series of public talks for 2025. This four-part series explores how we can stay human in the new era. Featuring Luke Bretherton, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman, Susannah Black Roberts and Dan Hitchens, each talk will take place before an invited audience and will be simultaneously livestreamed. We warmly invite you to join us online. See below for booking, recordings and texts.

We find ourselves in a period of epochal change as we move into an emerging new era. Amidst cultural confusion, we see fragmentation, accelerating AI, the breakdown of trust and extreme inequality. As concentrations of money and state power intensify, people feel the loss of agency. There is growing discontent. Serious questions lie before us: How can we restore our common life? How can we stay human? What good are human beings? Are all lives of equal value? These are some of the questions we will face as the new era unfolds.

While we recognize the realities before us, we at Together for the Common Good also sense that God is drawing us into a story of renewal and a deeper appreciation of what it means to be human. 

How should people of faith respond?

Remembering our friend, the late Frank Field, who embraced difficult questions with courage and honesty, we want to prompt a conversation that equips Christians to respond faithfully and constructively. Drawing on Catholic Social Thought and other traditions, our speakers will help us grapple with this moment between eras that will shape us for generations to come. 

The Series

Our Speakers

Luke Bretherton is the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, where he also directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, where he also has duties as a Church of England priest. Formerly the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke University in the United States, Luke has written many books, including A Primer in Christian Ethics and Christ and the Common Life. He is also the host of the Listen, Organize, Act! podcast which focuses on the practices of community organising.

Jon Cruddas is currently Co-Chair of the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, and Co-Leader of the Future of the Left Project at Policy Exchange. Formerly MP for Dagenham for 23 years, Jon is now at the leading edge of the debate around modern industrial relations, work, and employment in the age of artificial intelligence. He is a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at the University of Oxford and the author of The Dignity of Labour (Polity, 2021) and A Century of Labour (Polity, 2024). 

Maurice Glasman is the Director of the Common Good Foundation and the founder of the Blue Labour movement. Lord Glasman is a life peer and a key figure in the current battle for Labour’s soul, challenging the party to return to its founding principles. Alongside his academic and political work he also has for many years been involved in authentic community organizing, most recently in Grimsby in the North East of England. He is the author of Blue Labour: the Politics of the Common Good (Polity 2022).

Susannah Black Roberts is Senior Editor at the international magazine Plough Quarterly and an editor at Mere Orthodoxy and has written for many publications including First Things, Front Porch Republic, and The American Conservative. In the growing shadow of AI, Susannah investigates how everyday human practices can resist modernity’s dehumanising tendencies. A native Manhattanite married to an Englishman, she lives between New York and the West Midlands in the UK.

Dan Hitchens is the Senior Editor at First Things magazine and a contributor to Compact, Unherd, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Critic, Christianity Magazine, and various other publications. Formerly, he edited the Catholic Herald. As a freelance journalist, Dan has been conducting a forensic examination into the issue of assisted suicide. He holds a PhD on the 18th-century author Samuel Johnson, who is the guiding spirit for his personal newsletter. Dan is also the co-author of The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

We hope you can join us! Save the dates and set an alarm!

We would like to thank CCLA, the UK’s largest charity fund manager, for making this series possible, and to express our gratitude for the partnership of Plough Quarterly, Christian Action Research and Education (CARE) and The Catholic Union of Great Britain.