“History and Comparison in the Study of Religious Ethics”
with Professor David Clairmont, University of Notre Dame
12:15 – 1:20 PM
Location: Swift 106

The Theology & Religious Ethics Workshop and the Medieval Studies Workshop invite you to a joint session on Thursday, January 21st – 12:00 – 1:20 PM at Swift 208 – Lunch will be provided!

Professor David Clairmont (Tisch Family Associate Professor of Theology and Director of Master of Theological Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame) will be presenting on “History and Comparison in the Study of Religious Ethics (with additional thoughts on the challenges of writing and publishing in the field!)”. See the abstract below.

Abstract

In the genre of informal intellectual autobiography, this presentation will offer an account of the places negotiated for historical and comparative studies in religious ethics by tracing the development of one intellectual project initiated at the University of Chicago (an ecumenical divinity school with a long standing respect for the critical, comparative, academic study of religion) and completed at the University of Notre Dame (in a Roman Catholic department of theology). Among the topics examined will be (1) understanding the institutional context of the graduate student-as-scholar’s academic work, (2) thinking about intellectual continuity and scholarly audience when one’s institutional context changes with one’s first academic appointment, and (3) exploring how the elements of one’s academic formation can be either constrained or liberated, perhaps even integrated, with a change in academic environment and a guarded recognition of multiple viable academic publics. Guests are encouraged to share the genesis and transformation of their own recent academic projects, and some time will be devoted to describing the process of publishing journal articles and books.

David A.Clairmont studies comparative religious ethics, particularly the moral thought of Roman Catholicism and Theravada Buddhism, and issues of method in Catholic moral theology. He is interested in questions of moral formation, inter-cultural dialogue in the Church, and the importance of inter-religious dialogue for the future of Catholic moral theology. He is co-editor (with Don S. Browning) of American Religions and the Family: How Faith Traditions Cope with Modernization (Columbia University Press, 2007) and author of Moral Struggle and Religious Ethics: On the Person as Classic in Comparative Theological Contexts (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He is currently working on two books: first, an analysis of the shape and contemporary relevance of Bonaventure’s moral theology tentatively titled “Bonaventure’s Hope; and second, an introduction to comparative religious ethics” (with William Schweiker) tentatively titled “Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method.”