Health and other catastrophes affect millions upon millions of men and women globally. These tragic problems belie the comforting idea that science, technology and other forms of expertise can know, predict, and control human destiny. The devastating consequences of such catastrophes most frequently leave sufferers, their family members and members of the wider social network with the great burden of caregiving (and receiving). By and large the helping professions have not contributed in a major way to such caregiving. There has also been relatively little study of what sufferers and families actually do to alleviate pain, to respond to disablement, provide emotional support and help bear the moral consequences of severe loss. In this lecture, the speaker will set forth the reality of health and other human catastrophes and describe what caregiving is about. In this perspective, catastrophe alters our understanding of existential realities, and caregiving becomes one of the defining human acts. Moral experience is made over by the dynamic of catastrophe and caregiving. In our globalized, technologized, and medicalized world, there are substantial barriers to caregiving. But caregiving also provides a crucial means of remoralizing and rehumanizing our world. The speaker will use cross-cultural examples to illustrate these points and to develop a social theory of caregiving which he takes to be a crucial contribution of the social sciences and humanities.