In the mid seventeenth century, Thomas Traherne claimed human beings must retire into creation in order to fully know the virtues, including goodness, peaceableness and care. In this thesis I review Traherne's moral theory in light of recently discovered manuscripts of his work. For Traherne, because God's Divine goodness is the efficient cause of creation, creatures are naturally good. He uses Paracelsian optic and atomic theories to indicate how creatures communicate their goodness to one another. By retiring among creatures in their natural place, he argues that persons create a relational theatre in which they develop their capacity to sense creaturely communication. In this 'communion' persons perceive their mutual 'interest' with creatures in the relational nexus of creation. This knowledge provides motivation for 'blessed operations' of care for persons and creation. Because the human relationship to other creatures is morally significant, retiring among creation is a critical part of Christian moral formation. For Traherne this sensual engagement with a relational creation is necessary in the moral formation of children, who apprehend nature with their senses. Their innate wonder equips them to form their moral identity in relationship to a peaceable, caring creation. Traherne's account of the role of nature in moral development raises significant pedagogical questions in an age when scientific knowledge and the senses were increasingly disassociated from moral reasoning. For Traherne an education that denies the role of the senses in moral formation 'murders' the child by distracting her attention from the virtues of peace and mutuality that are present in creation. In conversation with phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, child psychologists Colwyn Trevarthen and Darcia Narvaez, and educational philosophers David Carr and Carol Gilligan, this thesis demonstrates the contemporary significance of Traherne's claims. Through the wonder of play, contact with the natural environment helps children develop an 'ecological' identity based on their relationship to other creatures. The perception of care in these early relationships is the basis for forming an inter-subjective moral identity and the virtues of care. Many 'care' ethicists and psychologists emphasize the early experiences of care taking. Environmental educators emphasize the caring relationship to creation. Hence they give substance to Traherne's claim that play, wonder and a sensory relationship with other creatures at an early age contribute to the formation of moral identity. Traherne's ideas also have pedagogical implications for theories of Christian moral formation. Theologians and ethicists, such as Rowan Williams, Michael Northcott and John Inge, have suggested place-based programmes of moral formation are needed in the parish context. This thesis demonstrates that Traherne's moral theory provides a rationale for understanding the theological significance of a child's natural wonder and the need for its cultivation in programmes of Christian education. A relationship to the local ecology of the parish can help a child perceive the care of creation, and play a proformative role in developing a moral identity in relationship to a caring Creator.

In this thesis, I will examine various methods of argument used for and against euthanasia by Christian, Islamic and secular ethicists. Overall, this is intended to examine the role of faith-specific or tradition-specific assumptions and sources in shaping the stance on euthanasia that is taken by certain Western Christian thinkers and scholars in Islamic Medical Ethics. Following an initial overview of some of the central concerns of the thesis in the introduction (Chapter I), I will look at a range of select Western Christian perspectives (Chapter II) and certain Western and Eastern Islamic perspectives (Chapter III) on euthanasia. In these chapters, I will investigate how various sources are used by particular Western Christian and Islamic scholars to formulate their perspective for or against euthanasia. In Chapter IV, I will compare the approaches of these Western Christian and Islamic ethicists to determine points of overlap and distinction. Based on this comparison, it may be contended that the Western Christian literature on euthanasia is in some respects more developed than the Islamic literature. Chapter V will take account of some of the types of argument that are found in the Christian literature but for which there is at present no fully developed counterpart in Sunni Islamic literature. For example, the notion of respecting the elderly, as it specifically relates to opposing euthanasia, is discussed in the Western Christian ethics literature reviewed, but is not considered at least in Islamic Medical Ethics sources examined in this thesis. On this basis, Chapter V will offer an expanded Western Sunni Islamic perspective on euthanasia, which engages with strategies of argument drawn from the Western Christian literature, so providing a contribution to the literature in the developing discipline of Islamic medical ethics. The conclusion to the study will identify the possibilities and nature of dialogue on this issue between faiths, and between monotheistic and other ethical perspectives. So a secondary objective is to examine the possibility of convergence of thought among Christians and Muslims not just on medical ethical issues, but on a range of further issues from a Western point-of-view. In this way, the thesis also aims to make a broader contribution to interfaith dialogue as well as the study of method in ethics directed toward a Western audience.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Sowle Cahill / Contrary to current transhumanist, medical, and cultural perspectives that aging is something solely to lament or even eradicate, this work explores the meaning of aging and death from the perspective of Christian theology, particularly within the schema of St. Augustine and Karl Barth. Both authors describe the complexity of aging in terms of our curse and calling as creatures aimed at participation in God through union with Christ. Locating Christology as central to our understanding of aging illuminates the ways in which the God revealed in Christ enters our humanity, sharing in our vulnerability, dependency, frailty, and even passivity. By turning to the incarnation, Christ's nature and work not only give us future hope, but transforms the daily aging experience - both active and passive waiting within our present, temporal reality for aging individuals and their surrounding communities. By maintaining union with God through contemplation and action, Christ dignifies our status as receptive and active agents. Thus, building from these two authors, I argue that aging serves as a sign and preparation for Sabbath rest by which aging persons might enact virtue through their specific vocation before God. Likewise, those persons surrounding the aging are called to enact virtues that reciprocally respond through interdependent communities that give and receive in union with Christ. Chapter One opens with preliminary questions on the meaning of death and aging while Chapter Two delineates Augustine's view on these realities as a result of the fall and original sin. However, even in Augustine's negative view of death and aging, he highlights the good in the soul/body relation and resurrected bodies. His position legitimizes grief and the human emotions, thus offering an ethics of compassion in loss. Finally, I constructively locate the positive view of aging and death is its sign and preparation for eternal Sabbath rest. Chapter Three considers Barth's analysis of death and aging as both negative and positive, evil and good through his dialectical lens. While death is a sign of judgment, finitude constitutes human identity as good in our temporal end. His ethics mirrors his anthropology in protecting life while accepting limits. He ends by describing the three stages of life including youth, middle age, and old age as composing our vocation. Each stage includes our call before God that legitimizes agency for the old as well as interdependent relationships. Chapters Four and Five explore the Christology of Augustine and Barth. Christ's divine and human natures bring together wisdom and knowledge for Augustine in Chapter Four. Aging persons grow in wisdom and knowledge through contemplation and action in union with Christ. Not only does union with Christ become the foundation for moral agency, but Christ also achieves the benefits for aging persons through his incarnation and atoning work. Christ experiences psychological anguish and forsakenness before God as the Totus Christus. Aging persons also receive the benefits of Christ's person and work that reverses the consequences of aging and death. Chapter Five claims that participation in Christ serves as the key to understanding Barth's Church Dogmatics. God's movement to humanity and our movement to God are embodied in the hypostatic union. Here we see Christ's active agency in his divine humility/obedience through the incarnation and atoning work. Christ's passive agency or human response perfectly embodies gratitude, prayer, and obedience through union with the Spirit in fulfilling his vocation in time. Moreover, in congruence with the work of W.H. Vanstone, Jesus' passive agency that receives the activity of the world legitimizes dignity and worth for those aging stages of life involving decline and dependence. Aging persons are agents who are active and passive, giving and receiving through a mixture of contemplation (prayer) and activity in union with Christ. Finally, Chapter Six synthesizes the Christology and participation present in the theologies of Augustine and Barth as the foundation for a moral virtue theory as it applies to aging persons and their surrounding communities. By emphasizing union with Christ in Augustine's virtue theory and union with Christ in Barth's morality of `vocation,' I argue moral agents are contemplative/acting persons intended for union with God. By receiving and giving in relationship with God and others, aging persons and their communities embody virtues that reciprocally benefit one another. Virtues for the aging include humility, gratitude, generosity, wisdom, prudence, memory, friendship, fortitude, and hope. Virtues for those communities surrounding aging persons entail respect, justice, mercy, and love. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The recent rapid warming of the planet, driven overwhelmingly by human emissions and activities, represents a novel and dire threat to both human and natural systems. It also constitutes an unprecedented global injustice, with those facing the first and, in many cases, the worst impacts being least responsible for causing the problem: the global poor, other species and future generations. Awakening to such a threat also presents a challenge for ethical deliberation, through provoking deep emotional responses that disturb settled identities. In view of all this, the task of ethical deliberation is urgently required. Yet it is itself vulnerable to being derailed by a variety of coping mechanisms that operate to keep the true scale of the problem below the level of our full attention and prevent the necessary frank assessment of what may be required of us. These largely unconscious protective strategies also open the door to those very emotions being exploited by the cultural, economic and political forces primarily responsible for the crisis in the first place. Hence, superficial and inadequate responses proliferate while many feel paralysed into inaction. In the face of this threat to thought, this project seeks to articulate an identity and stance based on Christian theological resources that opens up new space for ethical deliberation in the face of climate fears. Instead of being paralysed by such fears, this thesis argues that fear can instead illuminate and motivate when it is resituated in the service of love through solidarity with the suffering Christ, the poor and with the whole community of creation.

Thesis advisor: Kenneth R. Himes / This project constructs a public theology of Laudato Si' with which Catholics in the United States might shape climate change discourse, policy, and action. Chapter 1 outlines anthropogenic climate change and reviews magisterial Catholic teaching about this issue. Chapter 2 argues that the Christian church should engage with the world through both secular and faith-based language in the forms of public philosophy and public theology. Chapter 3 considers Catholic public theology in the contemporary U.S. Chapter 4 considers LS as a document of public theology and demonstrates how this document both develops Catholic public theology in the social encyclical tradition and is organized according to a modified Pastoral Circle. Chapter 5 analyzes a nationally representative public opinion survey of American adults to discern the likelihood that messages based on LS might move Americans’ climate change opinions more in line with Pope Francis’s ecological vision. Chapter 6 combines these insights with the reflections in Chapter 3 to construct an American Catholic public theology of LS that might help accordingly shape American climate change discourse, policy and action. The project thus combines theological ethics and social science to engage in applied ecological theological ethics and constructively suggest the contents of an evidence-based American Catholic public theology of LS with which the church might advance Pope Francis’s ecological vision. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Cathleen Kaveny / This dissertation examines current legal and moral debates about religious liberty and the sanctity of conscience in light of the Christian tradition’s understanding of both. It is important for strong respect for a pluralistic array of consciences to be grounded internally within the Christian tradition, not just based in secular public reason. This dissertation thus develops a Christian understanding of the conscience that can provide this justification, referred to as the “open communitarian conscience.” Specifically, the dissertation analyzes various understandings of the person within the Christian tradition, explores how these have affected political discussions about religious liberty, including sometimes giving support to an excessive individualism, and shows how there are contrasting understandings in the tradition which can be drawn on to better theorize the person’s relationship to her or his communities. It also develops a pneumatological understanding of the conscience to provide theological support for this personalist anthropology and explains how the conscience can be reconceived to better describe the relationship between a person and their moral actions. The dissertation includes a discussion of six key U.S. Supreme Court cases which address issues pertaining to religious liberty and the religious conscience, as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and suggests how an understanding of the open communitarian conscience might shift Christians’ understanding of how best to protect everyone’s rights of conscience while maintaining the First Amendment’s specific protection for rights of free exercise also. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The general argument of this thesis contends that the poetics of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, in particular a comparison between The Brothers Karamazov and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, remain profitable for political theological ethics. I conduct this analysis in critical comparison with the political theology of Henri de Lubac, with a focus on the question of desire and the sacramental mediation of the divine as it is embodied politically. Following de Lubac, especially in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, I argue that both Dostoesvky and Nietzsche were both deeply attuned to the fundamental human desire for the transcendent in modernity, a desire which engenders the creation of new images of the divine in order to unify society as a whole, mediating new forms of political identity. More specifically, I examine the problem of retributive desire in the poetics of The Brothers Karamazov and Thus Spoke Zarathustra as it connects with the historical development of Western Christianity and modernism. I demonstrate how their poetic formulations of retribution relates to suffering and the desire for the transcendent. In particular, I compare the characters of Dostoevsky’s novel, especially Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor with the antagonists in the narrative of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the “dragon” of Christian valuation and the “cold monster” of the modernist state. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Dostoesvky, Nietzsche, and de Lubac espouse conceptions of sacramental mediation that reflect a desire for a higher social unity that circumvents imperialistic intention, stimulating new possibilities for posthumanist political community. I maintain that Zarathustra can be interpreted as the poetic embodiment of immanent Dionysian desire, mediating a conception of transcendence, expressed through the thought of eternal recurrence, which transvaluates retributively rooted Western Christianity and modernist morality. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche reimagines a politic of friendship, whereby adversarial oriented relationships spur healthier life-affirming forms of living, courageously confronting the sick, unhealthy values of Christianity and modernism. In The Brothers Karamazov, as reflected in the story of Alyosha Karamazov, Dostoevsky imagines the divine as a mystery that envelops the immanent, mediated through the Incarnation of Christ, freely embraced through the sacrifice of the self. Dionysian desire is transfigured through the power of Resurrection, generating a cruciform way of living, embodied in the active, commitment of neighbour-love and a forgiveness-oriented spirit. For de Lubac, what remains decisive is the recovery of the social meaning of the Eucharist, the sacramental self-offering of Christ mediated through the church. Like Dostoevsky, de Lubac argues for the necessity of an inner, transformative reception of the divine Word embodied socially, yet this possibility is mediated through the liturgical practice of Roman Catholicism. For the Russian Dostoevsky, the particular ecclesial form of community is less defined institutionally. His poetics accentuate the reality of an innate eucharistically oriented “social structure,” expressed as a prophetic hope for the possibility of a healthier, life-affirming politic in Western culture if incarnationally embraced by the peoples of the West. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In the 20th-century, the advent of Taylorism led to a radical reconceptualisation in the organisation of human work. The formal scientifically-conceived aim of increased “efficiency” behind this project masked the moral and psychological changes which were also inherent in the project which is still ongoing. Now, at the turn of the 21st century, given the profusion of corporate scandals and the complicity of unscrupulous business practice in the current ecological and economic crises, researchers in a number of fields focused on work and its organisation have begun to warm to the possible relevance of religious ethics to social responsibility in business practices, offering some promise for a new rapprochement. In this dissertation, I offer a close study of the biblical texts that have nourished a moral vision of work for Christian and Jewish communities. I seek to nuance my study of these texts in Hebrew and Greek with an agrarian sensibility in order to highlight the moral vision of human / non-human interaction in the forms of work described and the ecological sensibility which undergirds this ancient vision of “good work” which is preserved in these texts. More specifically, I explore the moral relationship between work and worship through a close study of two related themes. In Part 1, I begin with a sustained look at the details of “good work” as narrated in the Tabernacle construction account in Exodus 25-40. This study of Exodus provides a platform upon which to explore work themes of volition, design, tacit knowledge, and interaction between the sociality and agency of work. In subsequent chapters, I go on to analyse subsequent temple construction accounts in 1 Kings, Jeremiah 22, Isaiah 60, Zechariah 14, 1-2 Chronicles, and across the New Testament. In this deliberately intertextual study, I attend to the transformation of the meaning of the Tabernacle/Temple across the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, as temple building texts in particular assume an eschatological aspect. My study of these subsequent construction accounts also adds nuance and texture to my account of moral making in conversation with several contemporary theorists, particularly with regards to work agency, aesthetics, sociality, skill and wisdom, and the material culture of work. This section culminates with the conclusion that in the New Testament, the church becomes both the product and the site of moral work building a new “temple”. Following this conclusion, in Part 2 of the dissertation, I develop a more detailed account of the relational dynamic between work and worship as it is delineated in Hebrew and Christian offertory practice. For this study, I turn to close readings of offertory practices in the Hebrew Scriptures (with special focus on Leviticus 1-3 and other Pentateuchal offertory texts), the New Testament and early Christian (1-4c.) moral philosophy. I highlight the relationship between worship and work in these liturgies and argue that in their practical logic, work is “drawn into worship.” In particular, I argue that three aspects of offertory practice may provide a framework for rehabilitating contemporary worship so that it may once again draw work into a morally formative dynamic. These three aspects correspond to the material and practised details of specific offerings and include: (1) the relativisation of utility with the burnt offering (2) the engagement of work quality and aesthetics through consecratory firstfruits offerings and (3) the sociality of liturgical work with the shared meal in the peace offering. These texts and the early Christian practices through which their liturgies were deployed hint at possible avenues for a rehabilitation of the moral work life of contemporary Christians. I argue that the proper performance of worship must “draw in” and engage the ordinary work of the people of God, and that a rehabilitation of offertory practice, particularly in light of the rich range of practices demonstrated in the Christian tradition offers a promising place for the reconceptualisation of work.

Thesis advisor: LISA S. CAHILL / The Nuremberg trials ushered in a new era in which the four principles approach has become progressively the norm in Euro-American biomedical ethics, while the concepts of virtue and character become marginalized. In recent decades, the AIDS pandemic has highlighted the social aspects of health and illness, and the individualistic nature of the four principles approach proves inadequate in addressing the social causes of illness and poor health. At the global level, the promotion of the four principles approach as the universal norm can lead to the displacement of local values and customs, and the alienation of people from their cultural heritage. In this dissertation, I argue that although principles are indispensable, the virtue-based approach is more adequate in addressing these needs. The dissertation demonstrates that a virtue-based medical ethics informed by the gospel vision of healing would support models of health care that take seriously the social determinants of illness, and advocate action on behalf of the poor and the marginalized. At the global level, virtue-based medical ethics also allows the coexistence of the universal values and the local norms, and encourages cross-cultural dialogue. This dissertation develops a virtue-based medical ethics grounded in the Aristotelian teleological structure, and integrating insights obtained from the historical critical study of the healing narratives in Luke-Acts. It also provides a correlative study of the love command in Luke and the virtue of humaneness in the medical ethics of eighteenth century Vietnamese physician Hai Thuong Lan Ong. The concluding chapter brings these elements together in a discussion of the work of the Vietnamese Catholic AIDS care network. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / The queer natural law is an ethical framework at the intersection of queer theory, queer theology, and the natural law ethical tradition largely used in Roman Catholic moral theology. As a framework, queer natural law adopts the eudaimonist, realist, and teleological emphases of the natural law virtue ethics tradition exemplified by Thomas Aquinas and restored by revisionist natural lawyers, and it refines the operations of these normative emphases through queer theory’s critical investigation of conceptual normativity. Conceived as a dynamic dialectical enterprise, queer theory offers to the natural law tradition a toolset for a more comprehensive assessment of human nature, specifically by taking a critical look at the operation of heteronormativity in normative frameworks. Symbiotically, the natural law tradition offers to queer theory a scaffold for conceiving of an ethics based in equality and nondiscrimination that allows queer theory’s ethical impulses to avoid postmodernity’s tendency towards circularity in ethical reasoning, precisely by grounding queer theory’s ethical motivations in a participatory discourse based in universal human goods. Using sexuality as a test case, this dissertation proceeds in four chapters. In the first, the notion of a queer natural law is explained in more detail. In the second, an account of human flourishing compatible with the queer natural law is articulated. In the third, a review of two natural law accounts of sexuality—magisterial and revisionist—is conducted. In the fourth and final chapter, differences between a revisionist natural law account of sexuality and a queer natural law account of sexuality are explored, defending the queer natural law thesis that the telos of sex is inter/personal pleasure. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.