According to the United Nations Development Programme, 1.1 billion people currently experience severe poverty. Furthermore, there is an intimate link between severe poverty and the burden of disease. The enormous incidence of mortality and morbidity isn’t randomly distributed. Rather, the crucial driving factor determining this distribution is severe poverty. What are the moral, political, and theological problems that severe poverty and the burden of disease yield for global health? Drawing from moral and political philosophy and Catholic Social Teaching, this lecture considers arguments for and against obligations of global health and develops responses to severe poverty and the burden of disease.

Speaker: Bharat Ranganathan, PhD, HEC-C 

Bharat Ranganathan is the Rabbi Sidney and Jane Brooks Assistant Professor of Social Justice and Religion at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His books include On Helping One’s Neighbor (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Religion and Social Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Ranganathan has held fellowships from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, and the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.

Free and Open to the Public

Sponsored by the Brooks Professorship in Social Justice and Religion