New Theology Faculty Focus on Human Dignity, Carmelite Spirituality

Why Catholic University?

It’s got a really special place in the history of Catholic theology in the United States and around the world. It’s also one of only maybe two or three doctoral programs in the United States that are faithfully Catholic and  staying true to the teachings of the Church while doing very high level work. 

What will you be teaching?

I’m teaching one course this fall – a new course I developed called Technology at the Margins of Human Life. We’re looking at the beginning and end of life including the massive changes that are coming with IVF and also at the other end of life, where we’re rethinking what it means to die. 

I also expect to be teaching a lot in the nursing school. I continue to think that nursing, especially Catholic nursing, is a model for whole person care. I co-authored Bioethics for Nurses: a Christian Moral Vision, which is likely the only book of its type available. 

Tell me about your new book, Living and Dying Well: A Catholic Plan for Resisting Physician-Assisted Killing. 

A big part of what I argue in the book is that if we’re going to truly resist physician assisted killing, the response has to include more than laws. The reasons why people request physician assisted killing have very little to do with physical pain or suffering. It’s mostly about feeling alone, feeling unloved, feeling like a burden. It was really something else to see so much of this play out in the death of my father, where all three of us kids and my mom were there and fully present throughout the dying process.

A big theme in your work is engaging in ethical questions with emerging technologies. What are your thoughts on the Catholic response to artificial intelligence? 

We are very clearly in the middle of a revolution, a new technological, industrial revolution. The Catholic Church is known for moving slowly in responding to various cultural patterns. That can be good as we don’t want just a kind of knee-jerk reaction, but things are developing so quickly. It strikes me just how important it is that Pope Leo XIV is taking the approach he’s taking. The Holy Father recognizes so clearly the relevancy of these questions and the urgency to respond to them. 

Looking over the horizon, what’s the next big leap in technology that you are concerned about?

There’s a new technology coming called in vitro gametogenesis, where any somatic cell can be turned into a gamete. So a skin cell of mine could potentially be turned into an ovum, and I could be the biological mother of a child. The consensus is that with IVG there is the potential to create thousands and thousands of embryos per cycle and use AI to sift through to pick the preferred embryos. 

How does it feel returning to campus?

It’s really great to come to an R1 university that also has such a strong sense of Catholic identity. I’m excited to be at a place where this kind of research is understood to be part of the university mission. I’m especially looking forward to working with grad students and shifting more toward an emphasis on research.

Tell us about the genesis of your new book, Body and Identity: The History of the Empty Self.

People have a lot of what seem to be body problems these days – gender is the obvious example, but also rhetoric around dieting, weight loss, body image issues. It’s really clear to me that these are not first and foremost body problems. They’re first and foremost spiritual and psychological problems that center around identity - who am I?

 A lot of what we think are body problems are actually identity problems. The book gives a history of identity through the centuries, going back to the ancient Greeks. I conclude that we contemporary people essentially have empty selves - our identities have been hollowed out, and we therefore look to our bodies to fill in the missing identity. But our bodies aren’t made to do that for us. What I originally hoped would be a chapter or two on the history of identity turned into a whole book, so the next book will provide a more constructive answer to the body identity question. 

Where will students see you this academic year?

I’ll be teaching basic dogmatic theology classes: Christology, theological anthropology, Trinity. I might also teach some systematic-moral crossover classes on topics like gender or Theology of the Body.

Any other forthcoming projects?

I wrote my dissertation nearly 20 years ago on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of the analogy of being. There's been exponentially more secondary scholarship on Balthasar since I wrote that, so it was great going back to update it. I’ve heavily revised and updated it — it should be coming out in about a year with Word on Fire Academic Press. 

Father Craig Morrison, O.Carm., joins the faculty from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where he was dean of the faculty of Ancient Near Eastern Languages. He is a University alumnus, having earned an MA in semitic languages. He succeeds Father Steven Payne as director of the Center for Carmelite Studies. 

What are your goals as the incoming director of the Center for Carmelite Studies?

I’m going to follow in the good things that have been done — managing the center, attracting scholars, and coordinating the certificate program in Carmelite Studies. 

We have a rich intellectual tradition, and at Catholic University, that tradition was concretized by the many Carmelites who served here as professors — Roland Murphy, who was my personal mentor, John Sullivan, Kieran Kavanaugh, Ernest Larkin, Romaeus O’Brien, and Christian Ceroke. Following in the footsteps of these intellectual giants, Father Steven Payne took up that mantle and reestablished it here through the Center for Carmelite Studies. I step into this role with a tremendous sense of gratitude for those who came before me, and I pray to God for the strength to carry this tradition forward. 

What are you teaching this fall?

I have a passion for helping people preach. Not that I’m good at it, but it’s probably because I know I struggle that I am a pilgrim along the way, alongside the rest of the other preachers. The course I’ve been teaching has been really, really wonderful. The students just preached their first three-minute daily homily and they came really prepared. In my experience encouraging priests, I always say to them that your homily won’t always work but you always want to make sure the people of God have a sense you were prepared and that you didn’t wing it. They always have to know you spoke with the text. 

I’m also teaching a course on the Psalms. I have a passion for encouraging young people to dive deeply into a text, to get into the weeds, to get the Bible in their hands. It is a gift of the Church. I also feel really blessed because I could spend much of yesterday meditating on Psalm 22, really thinking through that psalm and how to present it in a way that’s engaging to the students. 

Any plans for the spring semester?

Next semester, I’m going to teach a course on Elijah and the tradition. I have written on Elijah in Aphrahat, so we will talk about those writings and also those of the Greek and Latin Fathers. There’s a late medieval document called the Institute of the First Monks, in which the Carmelites trace their history from Elijah to their own day.