Max Charlesworth
[1] However, having contracted tuberculosis, Charlesworth was forced to delay taking up the scholarship and spent the next two years at the Gresswell Sanatorium in Victoria.
[1] After recovering, Charlesworth followed the advice of his mentor, Professor Alexander Boyce Gibson and continued his postgraduate studies in 1953 at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium.
Charlesworth gained his Doctorate in Philosophy, avec la plus grande distinction, from UCL in 1955 and was then appointed to a lectureship at the University of Auckland in 1956.
[5] Charlesworth’s influence extended beyond the academy; he believed that philosophy should concern itself less with arcane technicalities and more with the problems facing society.
[6] He considered that the Movement's insistence that Christian values should have a privileged place in society distorted the proper relationship between Church and State.
[4] Charlesworth aired his critique in the pages of the Catholic Worker, a journal he co-edited with Tony Coady in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"[4] Charlesworth died in 2014 survived by his wife, Stephanie, their seven children (Sara, Hilary, Stephen, Lucy, Bruno, Anna and Esther), and eleven grandchildren.
[1] After his death, Charlesworth was awarded a posthumous Honorary Doctorate of Letters in 2014 from Deakin University "for distinguished academic services in the fields of education, humanities and bioethics.
[6] Charlesworth was not solely interested in Catholicism or even just the greater Christian tradition: he had a fundamental curiosity in the variety of the world’s religions, how they worked, and why.
He examined the way different religions responded to basic ethical questions, producing a children’s book, illustrated by Robert Ingpen, entitled Religious Worlds.
Wayne Hudson has noted that "without abandoning his personal Catholicism, [Charlesworth] embraced the more stringent implications of pluralism within the framework of liberal political philosophy".
Working with anthropologists, Charlesworth insisted that Aboriginal religions should be taken seriously in their own right as systems of spiritual meaning rather than simply as cultural artefacts.
He translated and commented on St. Anselm's Proslogion as well as "The World Order", the 15th volume of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae from the original Latin.
In 1975, Charlesworth produced a series of radio programmes for the ABC, which were later turned into a book, called The Existentialists and Jean-Paul Sartre.
These broadcasts introduced an Australian audience to the main tenets of existentialism, including through interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as various critiques.
[12] Charlesworth attempted to bridge the divide between the two groups, while acknowledging the difficulty of resolving ethical issues in a liberal democratic society where there exists no common standard of morality.
