A certain “rugged individualism,” characterizing classical Catholic moral theology, can be traced to theology's defining love according to the model of appetite. This model of love, in turn, is part and parcel of the prepersonalistic, static “faculty psychology” that logically and inevitably flows from the Aristotelian, substance-accidents worldview. To overcome classical individualism in principle and to become solidly established as a socially conscious science, moral theology must operate from a new understanding of love—love understood according to the model of freedom.

God may be free either to create or not to create a world distinct from himself. But that world, to have any being over against God, must be ontologically detached from God. The beings of that world must exercise their own freedom, and that freedom must be independent of God. God may create the world out of no thing, but out of an uncreated freedom.

This essay explicates a contribution of developmental moral psychology to religious ethics in the task of interpreting the relationship between religion and morality. It argues that a criterion of self-transcendence is implicit in the developmental perspectives of major psychological theorists, and from this that the same drive for self-transcendence which grounds religious experience also constitutes the dynamic factor in moral consciousness—that both authentic morality and genuine religion are expressions of a single radical dynamism of the human spirit.

Three theses are offered concerning the nature of theology: (a) In general theology has been the translation of a story into a philosophy in order to preserve the story, which is thought to be necessarily meaningful. (2) This procedure is not defensible, for it subverts both story and philosophy, and the meaningfulness of a story depends on other assumptions, e.g., about the nature of the world. (3) A theology will best serve its tradition not by determinedly ascribing meaning to it, but by evaluating it critically in the light of experience.

An interdisciplinary seminar focusing on various attempts to articulate the human aspiration toward transcendence. Through selected readings, reflection and discussion, this course will consider the personal and psychological odyssey towards relation, wholeness and health; the aesthetic quest for beauty and richness of meaning; the philosopher's search for clarity, understanding and ultimacy; and the historical and political struggle for purpose and direction—in terms of an underlying thematic unity which all of these expressions of the human spirit share: the human desire to transcend.