Announcing the 2025 Georgetown Global Dialogues in Rome and Barcelona
New Visions for Human Equality, Fraternity, and Solidarity
The conviction that all human beings are equal in dignity and rights and are called to love and support one another is the heart of the world's religions and wisdom traditions—and ought to inform politics and civil society. But today ideals of human fraternity and solidarity are under pressure to an unprecedented degree, threatened by global waves of passionate tribalism and obsessive materialism.
Article I of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and “should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”—was more an aspiration than a concrete reality. Today the Declaration seems utopian and even the aspiration is in retreat.
How can we reimagine the commitment to the ideal of human equality in a divided and polarized world? What resources do contemporary writers and artists—and the cultural and spiritual traditions upon which they draw—bring to building fraternity and solidarity?
Over the course of 2025 the Georgetown Global Dialogues (GGD) will explore these questions at two gatherings, in Rome (June) and Barcelona (November). A multiyear conversation which began in Washington, DC, in April 2024, GGD brings leading thinkers from the Global South into ongoing public conversations about ways forward in a divided world. The initiative seeks to advance what Pope Francis calls a “culture of encounter”—sustained global dialogue that acknowledges deep differences while maintaining a focus on the pursuit of the common good.
Rome (June 9-10, 2025)
Human Fraternity in a Divided World: Writers Engage the Legacy of Pope Francis
Subscribe to the GGD mailing list for updates, including livestream details.
In October 2020, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pope Francis elaborated a bold vision of human equality and fraternity in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti—“Brothers and Sisters All.” Challenging a pervasive “cool, comfortable and globalized indifference,” he called for vibrant dialogue and encounter across cultural, social, national and religious lines. Writers and artists have a key role to play in such an undertaking. In 2023 Francis asked them to “continue to dream, to be restless, to conjure up words and visions that can help us interpret the mystery of human life and guide our societies towards beauty and universal fraternity.”
On the fifth anniversary of Fratelli Tutti, the Georgetown Global Dialogues, Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, All of Us Foundation, La Civiltà Cattolica, and the Georgetown University Representative Office in Rome will bring together writers and artists to explore the themes of global equality and fraternity, with a focus on novelists from the Global South.
Barcelona (November 4-6, 2025)
Human Frailty and Global Solidarity
Subscribe to the GGD mailing list for updates, including livestream details.
Fragmentation and polarization in today’s world are reinforced by claims and counterclaims of victimhood. Hatred and resentment, exacerbated by social media echo chambers, swamp efforts to understand and identify with the other. Any fresh vision for global solidarity must address structural inequalities in our societies and how to alleviate them. But it will also require a fuller recognition of an often-overlooked basis of our common humanity: a widely shared sense of frailty, the human experience of suffering, weakness and humiliation.
The Promethean passions binding modern humanity—the desire for unbridled power and freedom, for unlimited self-fulfillment, acquisition of goods, and mastery of the natural world—have collided with political and environmental constraints, inflicting pain and a sense of powerlessness on multitudes across the world. Literature and the arts, with their innate virtues of ambiguity and irony and their openness to paradox and contradiction, can help us to understand our precariousness and extend imaginative sympathy across hardened boundaries.
GGD and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona will bring together writers and critics to address the relationship between human frailty and global solidarity, with a focus on voices from the Global South. A formal program of panels will be flanked by informal dialogues—online and in person—with university students.
Why Literature and the Arts?
Many traditional modes of reportage and commentary are struggling amid the present worldwide surge of political antagonism and polarization. Reason is deployed too frequently for sophistical argument, and knowledge seems to many people little more than a function of power that is therefore suspect. Literature and the arts, with their unique capacity to describe the complex states of consciousness of different peoples at different times and different places, can broaden our understanding can foster greater fraternity and solidarity.
Of particular interest, given our global moment, are writers whose characters and stories explore global divides—their historical foundations and present effects, the problems they pose and creative ways to address (if not overcome) them. Narratives that recognize the reality of evil and the inevitability of deep moral conflict while avoiding demonization and caricature can open spaces for encounter and reconciliation—both within stories and in the wider cultures within which they are embedded.
Imagining human fraternity as a real possibility, not a utopian fantasy, does not mean turning a blind eye to the pervasive structural oppression around us. Basic human dignity and equality are being violated across the world. But literature and the arts, more than religion and philosophy, not only posit an alternative reality. They help us imagine a way to realize it—in our own lives and in the life of global society.
—Thomas Banchoff and Pankaj Mishra, co-conveners
Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs is organizing GGD with the support of campus partners including Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q), the Walsh School of Foreign Service, the College of Arts & Sciences, the McDonough School of Business, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.
For updates, subscribe to the GGD mailing list. Direct any questions to globaldialogues@georgetown.edu.