Communication in Real Time: Theoretical and Applied Research Approaches, edited with Dan Schill and Amy Jasperson. Kirk has more than thirty book chapters and articles in scholarly publications and is a frequent commentator in the media.
D. Stephen Long (PhD, Duke University) is the Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Long is an ordained United Methodist Minister in the Indiana Conference. He has served churches in Honduras, North Carolina, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr. Long works in the intersection between theology and ethics and has published more than fifty essays and fourteen books on theology and ethics, including Divine Economy: Theology and the Market; The Goodness of God: Theology, Church, and Social Order; John Wesley’s Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness; Calculated Futures: Theology, Ethics, and Economics; Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction; Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation; and The Perfectly Simple Triune God: Aquinas and His Legacy. Dr. Long was baptized by the Anabaptists, educated by the evangelicals, pastorally formed by the Methodists, and given his first teaching position by the Jesuits, which makes him ecumenically inclined or theologically confused.
Robin Lovin (PhD, Harvard) is the former William H. Scheide Senior Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton and is the Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics emeritus at Southern Methodist University. He joined the SMU faculty in 1994 and served as dean of Perkins School of Theology from 1994 to 2002. Prior to this, he was dean of the Theological School at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and a member of the faculty at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Dr. Lovin’s most recent books are Christian Realism and the New Realities and An Introduction to Christian Ethics. He has also written extensively on religion and law and comparative religious ethics. In 2013, he held the Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress. He is a Visiting Scholar at Loyola University Chicago, an Honorary Trustee of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, and a member of the advisory board for the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Oxford University.
Richard O. Mason (PhD, University of California Berkley) is the Carr P. Collins Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Edwin L. Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Mason currently serves on the Mercy Regional Medical Center Ethics Committee in Durango, Colorado, is a member of the Professional Associates advisory group at Fort Lewis College, and was recently on the board of the Women’s Resource Center. He served as director of the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility from 1998 to 2005. The author of numerous academic articles and books, in 2001 he received the AIS Fellow LEO Award for lifelong contribution to the information systems field from the Association of Information Systems. In 1992 he was made a Foreign Fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences in the Infomatics and Cybernetics section.
William F. May (PhD, Yale) is a retired professor and has since served as a visiting professor in the department of political science at Yale, a chair holder in ethics and American studies at the Library of Congress (established by Cary M. Maguire), and, most recently, a fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life at the University of Virginia. Earlier, he chaired the department of religious studies at Smith College and founded and chaired the department of religious studies at Indiana University. Thereafter he held the Joseph P. Kennedy Chair at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, and the Cary M. Maguire Chair in Ethics at Southern Methodist University, where he also founded and directed the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility. Professionally, Dr. May has cochaired the research group on death and dying at the Hastings Center and served as president of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics. In public life, he served on the Clinton Task Force on Health Care Reform and as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Thomas Wm. Mayo (JD, Syracuse University) is an Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and adjunct professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where he teaches medical ethics, and is Of Counsel to Haynes and Boone, LLP. After practicing law in New York and Washington, DC, and serving as a law clerk to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, he joined the SMU law faculty in 1984. He has taught seventeen courses, most recently Health Care Law, Bioethics and Law, Nonprofit Organizations, Public Health Law & Ethics, Legislation, Torts, and (for the past twenty-three years) a joint offering with UT Southwestern Medical School: Law, Literature and Medicine. He was a “Co-Principal Investigator” (with Prof. William F. May) in the creation of SMU’s Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility and served as its third director from 2005 to 2010.
John Sadler (MD, Indiana University) is a professor of psychiatry and clinical sciences and the Daniel W. Foster, MD Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Dr. Sadler directs the division of ethics in the department of psychiatry and is the institution-wide Director of the Program in Ethics in Science & Medicine at UT Southwestern. Dr. Sadler’s career has spanned research, education, administration, and clinical practice. His main research area has been in the philosophy and ethics realm—from clinical ethics, to research ethics, to the philosophy of psychiatry. He is editor-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins University Press journal Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology and the Oxford University Press book series International Perspectives on Philosophy and Psychiatry.
Gratitudes
We are grateful to this book’s many contributing authors—renowned academics, researchers, and practitioners—each of them committed to the study and practice of ethics. Their diversity of perspective and wisdom allowed for a robust conversation on the teaching of ethics across university disciplines and makes the case for a systematic and academic effort to develop a multidisciplinary approach to the development of ethical cultures.
The role of four groups of people at SMU is also notable. Our professional advisory board, cochaired by our founder Cary Maguire and the spirited Bobby B. Lyle, is an ever-present source of wisdom. Their ideas, involvement with the larger Dallas community, and vision for what ethics education might produce have been instrumental in our programming and development. Our academic advisory board challenges us to avoid the trite and dig deeply into the thoughtful and inquisitive that characterize a university. And, of course, our board of trustees led by President R. Gerald Turner who gave ethics education full weight in our strategic plan.
Finally, we are thankful for the students that fill the university and our classrooms with their curiosity and spirit and allow us to share in this very special phase of life.
To our colleague Adria Richmond, and to our families, John Phillips, Robert Whillock, and Rene and Caroline Crespo. We couldn’t have done this without you.
Introduction
We used to believe that our ethics are learned at our mother’s knee, that the formation of our ethics is completed at an early age. But that is not true. Our ethics are developed throughout our lives, first as children from our family, then by modeling others we hold in regard, and further influenced by interactions with our peers, communities, media, books, and environment. In previous generations, education supplemented religious teaching by implementing and practicing the manners of civil society. Students were taught to read, reason and debate. They practiced memorizing lofty words of wisdom through declaration and poetry. Yet that is not the education today. Despite the hand-wringing of critics, students today have more knowledge available to them than can be absorbed; mastery of a subject area creates siloes where most every course is tailored to comprehending subject matter that may be outdated before they graduate. But learning is more than subject-matter expertise.
This book begins with the questions that plague academics who are unsure of the proper role of ethics courses in the curriculum. What should an ethics course seek to do? What are its outcomes and measures of success? Our fast-paced environment requires instantaneous reactions to complex questions. Our instant messaging age
