Dr. Sinja Küppers presented at the XIX. International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford (UK), 5-9 August 2024 as part of the main conference workshop on Inequality and Impediments to Virtue sponsored by the Flourishing in Early Christianity Project at Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Critical Religion and Inquiry, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, and the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. In her presentation on “Inequality is the Starting Point of a Pleasant Life”: Human Flourishing in Christian Philosophy she argues that Christians deemed secular class distinctions essential to human flourishing and reproduced them in theoretical treatises (such as Theodoret of Cyrus, On providence 6.22) and the practical design of ascetic communities in the third and fourth centuries C.E
