
Margaret Farley, professor emerita at Yale Divinity School has won the 2008 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics! We here at Continuum are all extremely proud of her for this very high honor. Below is the official press release:
2008 -
Margaret Farley
Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics
Dec. 6, 2007
A Yale scholar who says justice is an essential part of sexual ethics
has won the 2008 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
Margaret Farley, a professor emerita of Christian ethics
at Yale Divinity school, earned the prize for the ideas set forth in
her 2006 book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.
Winner of the 17th Grawemeyer religion prize, her work was selected
from among 52 entries from the United States, United Kingdom and Brazil.
Human sexual relationships must be not only loving but fair, because
justice is the quality that forms, guides and protects love, Farley
writes.
“It’s an important message in light of all the
confusion surrounding sexuality today,” said Susan Garrett, a professor
at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary who directs the award
program. “The religious right issues stark decrees while the
entertainment industry tells us ‘anything goes.’ People are confused
about what’s right.”
Farley draws “clear and compelling
guidelines from Christian tradition on what makes love ‘just,’ which
helps us understand how to think about sexuality in the context of our
faith,” Garrett said.
A Roman Catholic nun and the first woman to
teach full-time at Yale Divinity School, Farley has written or
co-written seven books. She is past president of the Society of
Christian Ethics and the Catholic Theological Society of America.
About Margaret Farley
Margaret Farley has devoted her life to studying some of life’s most difficult ethical questions.
Farley,
the Gilbert L. Stark professor emerita of Christian ethics at Yale
Divinity school, began teaching there in 1971. A Roman Catholic nun in
the Sisters of Mercy order, she started her teaching career in 1962 at
Mercy College of Detroit and also was a visiting lecturer at the
University of Detroit.
Her Grawemeyer-winning book,
“Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” published by
Continuum Group in 2006, is the seventh book she has written or
co-written. Her other books include “Personal Commitments: Beginning,
Keeping Changing” (1986), “Readings in Moral Theology, No. 9: Feminist
Ethics and the Catholic Moral Tradition” (1996) and “Compassionate
Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical Ethics” (2002).
Farley
has written more than 90 articles on topics such as celibacy, AIDS and
faith, divorce, feminism and embryonic stem cell research and how they
relate to religion. In addition, she has lectured on these topics in
communities across the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa.
The
recipient of 11 honorary degrees, she also has received many
fellowships and awards, including the John Courtney Murray Award for
Excellence in Theology (1992), a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology
(1996-97) and a U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute
Award (2002).
A past president of the Society of
Christian Ethics and the Catholic Theological Society of America, she
co-directs the All-Africa Conference: Sister to Sister, a project
designed to empower African women to tackle the AIDS pandemic in their
country.
She holds a master’s degree in philosophy from
the University of Detroit and master’s and doctoral degrees in
religious studies from Yale.
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