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Academic Skills
Critical reading, academic writing, research proficiency, and the confidence to present ideas in conversation.
Equipping students to refine ethical awareness across communities, churches, and society.
"A survey introduction to contemporary sources, norms, and methods for doing Christian Ethics: exploring morality, human activity, and theo‑ethical issues in conversation with multiple ethnocultural traditions."
This course equips students with tools for moral reflection, drawing on Scripture, tradition, and lived experience. Through lectures, group discussions, presentations, and a research paper, students engage contemporary ethical challenges across cultural, social, and political contexts.
The classroom is treated as a working table. We read carefully, we argue honestly, and we keep asking what difference our reading makes once we leave the room.
Critical reading, academic writing, research proficiency, and the confidence to present ideas in conversation.
Engagement with key ethical thinkers from your own tradition, and a sharper eye for how sociopolitical context shapes the ethical task.
Ethical competency for personal practice, and for serious engagement with diverse cultural and faith traditions.
Frameworks, intercultural skills, and interfaith sensibilities you can carry into the contemporary moral challenges your communities face.
We begin where every ethical tradition begins: with the question of where moral judgment comes from. We frame the vocabulary of Christian ethics, examine its sources in Scripture, tradition, and human experience, and look at the methods that have shaped the field.
The aim of this opening movement is orientation. By the end of it, students share a working language for the conversations that follow.
From the inherited tradition we turn to the voices that have reshaped Christian ethics in the last half-century. Cultural background, religious formation, and social location enter the conversation as sources, not noise.
This movement asks how each of us reads the tradition from somewhere, and what difference that "somewhere" makes for the ethical questions we are willing to ask.
Building on the previous movement, we walk into the contemporary terrain: race, gender, sexuality, colonization, environment, and the intercultural pressures of migration. Each issue is treated as a moral question and as a theological one.
The goal is not to settle these debates in a single semester. It is to learn how to enter them with care, with sources, and with honesty about what is at stake.
We close the course by drawing the threads together. Each student leaves with a clearer sense of where they stand, what tools they trust, and what work the next stage of their formation is asking of them.
This final movement treats the end of the course as a beginning. Ethics is a practice that ripens over a lifetime, not a credit on a transcript.
The full reading list is distributed through the term. A handful of representative voices the course returns to:
Citations follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition.