Margaret Farley lecturing at Yale on February 23, 28, & March 1

Margaret Farley to deliver Taylor Lectures on “Freedom, Obligation, and Love”

 

Margaret Farley, the Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, will deliver the 2012 Nathaniel W. Taylor Lectures on Feb. 23, 28, and March 1 on the topic “Freedom, Obligation, and Love.”  All lectures, free and open to the public, begin at 5:30 pm in Niebuhr Hall on the YDS campus, 409 Prospect St., New Haven.

 

Farley, a member of the Sisters of Mercy order of nuns, is a widely known Christian ethicist who was on the faculty of YDS from 1971 to 2007. During the course of her career, she has been a progressive theological voice in a broad range of areas including feminist theology, medical and sexual ethics, the role of women in the church, homosexuality and the church, and religious perspectives on the environment.

 

In 2008 she received the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (Continuum, 2006). The Grawemeyer Award is among the nation's most prestigious prizes in the field of religion and is awarded jointly by the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville.

 

Deliver of Farley’s Taylor Lectures will take place as follows:

 

·      Lecture I, “Embodiment, Choice, and Action,” Thursday, February 23, 5:30 pm

·      Lecture II, “Desires, Loves, and Reasons,” Tuesday, February 28, 5:30 pm

·      Lecture III, “Morality and Self-Determination,” Thursday, March 1, 5:30 pm

 

Addressing questions of the meaning and possibility of human freedom of choice, Farley’s lectures will speak to problems raised by scientists, philosophers, and theologians. The central element will be a descriptive analysis of the experience of free choice—not the question of whether there can be free choice, but on the structure of what we choose when we choose, raising the further question of whether every choice is ultimately a choice of what and how to love.

 

The Nathaniel W. Taylor Lectureship in Theology was created in 1902 by a gift from Rebecca Taylor Hatch of Brooklyn, New York, in memory of her father, who was Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology from 1822 to 1858.