If we all weren't so cynical, we might expect professional ethicists—or say a professor of ethics or morality at a university—to also be a really morally virtuous and good person. And by extension, you might also expect a theologian to be a person of deeper faith. And that's because intellectual reflection about matters of justice, right and wrong, God and human flourishing all cut to the core of what it means to be human, and the things you discuss in an ethics or theology course, if you took those ideas seriously, just might change the way you live.

Today, in our series on the Future of Theology, Matt Croasmun hosts Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Eric reflects on what it's like to teach theology in a secular institution—the good, the bad, and the ugly of that exercise; the complications of making professors of humanities, ethics, and religion into moral or spiritual exemplars; the centrality of the good life in the purpose of higher education; and the importance of discerning and articulating the multifarious visions of the good life that are presumed by the institutional cultures in which we live, and move, and have our being.

About Eric Gregory

Eric Gregory is Professor of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and articles in a variety of edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Theology, Studies in Christian Ethics, and Augustinian Studies. His interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, law and religion, and the role of religion in public life. In 2007 he was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. A graduate of Harvard College, he earned an M.Phil. and Diploma in Theology from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University School of Law. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled, The In-Gathering of Strangers: Global Justice and Political Theology, which examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice. Former Chair of the Humanities Council at Princeton, he also serves on the the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics and sits with the executive committee of the University Center for Human Values.

Show Notes

• “Part of the virtue of the humanities, I think, is to kind of dislocate us and to kind of allow us to inhabit different worlds than the ones that we have prior to encountering these texts.”
• “There is a kind of healthy way in which unifying or directing the task of theology with respect to a particular vision of that good life that will be fleshed out in different ways by different theologies is one way to find a place for the discourse of theology.”
• “Universities are not just places of the production of information, but are also sites where people seek to ask questions about how they should live. And if universities can't do that, it's very difficult in our current culture to find spaces of reflection that allow that possibility.”
• “[Universities should have] a desire to shape whole persons and to not just view education as a commodity that we are delivering to customers, but to kind of reconsider what a liberal arts education might look like.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured religious ethicist Eric Gregory and biblical scholar Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give