On Monday, November 3rd, 2025, Dr. Samuel Kimbriel gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center. Samuel Kimbriel, Ph.D., is the Founder and Director of Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative.

Philosophers from Aristotle onward have often considered love—and friendship in particular—to be very near to the culmination of human life. We cannot attain the fullest version of our human selves without it. Yet love is always occurring against the backdrop of history, and the conditions of love are shifting dramatically in our time.

The age of mass media has altered the scale of human community dramatically. The churn of our economic model shifts the structure of material dependency. And now in the age of AI we are seeing both centralizing and isolating factors, all of which are changing the conditions for love. This lecture will assess these shifting conditions—and mount its own defense regarding the future of love.

Lecturer Bio

Dr. Samuel Kimbriel is a political philosopher, author, and founding director of Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative. He is the author of Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation published by Oxford University Press, and he holds MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge.

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