Loyola University Chicago

Department of Theology

ISET - Ethics

Ethics Focus

In some respects, the ISET program with a focus in Ethics is similar to other doctoral programs in Christian Ethics. Students receive intensive training in the history, foundations, methods, and contexts of Christian Ethics. Students in the program must complete 30 hours of coursework (10 courses). Two of these will be the ISET seminar (see below), five must be in Christian Ethics, one must be in Historical or Systematic Theology, and two are electives. These electives may be taken in a relevant cognate field outside the Theology Department with the permission of the Graduate Program Director and the academic advisor.

In addition, students in this program attend to the ways in which Christian ethics grows out of and is shaped by theological commitments, and in turn, how our ethical commitments inform our theologies. The program reflects the reality that what we believe about God has implications for how we should live in our personal, political, and social lives, and that the exercise of human moral agency shapes our relationship to and ideas about God. The integrative focus of our program reflects the particular strengths and interests of our faculty, and we believe it prepares our graduates well for the sort of disciplinary flexibility needed in many contemporary teaching contexts.

Faculty 

William C. French (Catholic theological ethics and Natural Law; ecological ethics; war and peace)

Hille Haker (Philosophical foundations of Catholic & Christian Ethics; Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory; recognition theory and moral responsibility, bioethics, theories of justice, feminist ethics, ethics and literature)

Tisha Rajendra (Catholic Social Teaching and Ethics, philosophical foundations of Catholic and Christian Ethics, migration, and transnational & global ethics)

Michael Schuck (Catholic Social Teaching and Social Ethics; political ethics, ecological ethics; social theory and religious ethics; faith, human development and the social-moral self)

Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar (Christian social and theological ethics (Catholic and Protestant), feminist ethics (theological and philosophical), dependency and disability studies, theologies of love and justice, feminist ethics, methods in contemporary ethics)

Aana Marie Vigen (Protestant social and theological ethics, social scientific methods of moral reasoning (ethnography/qualitative studies); bioethics; feminist theology and ethics, ecological ethics)