User:Bdawleykkiseli/Lisa Sowle Cahill

Dr. Lisa Sowle Cahill is a central figure in contemporary Roman Catholic Theological Ethics. She first became known in the 1980s with her studies on gender and sexual ethics, but now she has extended her work to social and global ethics. In graduate school, she had concentrated on ecumenical theology and on bioethics, but in the 80s she switched to gender and sexual ethics because there was greater demand for women in that field. Lisa Sowle Cahill’s work focuses on an attempt to discuss the complexity of moral issues while lowering tensions about theological disagreements between the Church and society. She has been engaged in debates over the applications of Christian theology to social issues, such as the relationship between the Church and politics in abortion and culture-war problems.

Biography
Dr. Cahill grew up primarily in northern Virginia. She attended the Sisters' of Mercy Holy Trinity High School in Washington D.C. from 1962 to 1966. During her senior year of high school her father arranged for her to live in an Opus Dei residence for women after her high school principle recommended it to her parents. In 1970, Dr. Cahill received a B.A. in Theology from Santa Clara University. She then went on to receive her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She completed her dissertation, which focused on the issue of euthanasia among Protestants and Catholics, in 1976 under the guidance of James Gustafson. James Gustafson introduced her to Richard McCormick SJ and Father Charles Curran, both of whom have influenced her own career in moral theology. She has taught at Boston College since 1976 and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, and a Visiting Professor of Catholic Theology at Yale University Today she is a mother of five children, three of which she adopted from Thailand.

Career
Sometimes called a feminist theologian and sometimes a bioethicist, Dr. Cahill has published over two hundred articles and has worked on as many as fifteen books. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2008 she was awarded the John Courtney Murray Award by the Catholic Theological Society of America. Dr. Cahill has taught at Boston College since 1976 and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, and a Visiting Professor of Catholic Theology at Yale University. Currently, Dr. Cahill is a Professor at Boston College, teaching courses such as:
 * Western Cultural Tradition I, II, III, IV (undergraduate Honors Program)
 * Christian Ethics: Major Figures
 * Christian Ethics: Contemporary Figures
 * Christian Perspectives on Bioethics
 * Ethics of Sex and Gender
 * Christology and Ethics
 * Ethics Doctoral Seminar

Health Care
A reoccurring subject in Cahill’s work, Cahill is adamant that Health Care is necessary for human dignity. Though she is an advocate of the “preferential option of the poor" view, she does think that this may not be realistic for the American System. Many of her concerns for Health Care come from her personal experience of having five sons, ages 25-32, who do not receive employer-based health insurance. In 2008, Dr. Cahill was a member of Obama’s Catholic Advisory Committee, strongly supporting health-care reform. In her lecture "Bioethics and the Common Good" she describes how providing health care for all people is an essential goal of Christians and that it is an injustice for people in better economic standing to receive better health care than the poor.

Books
Some of Dr. Cahill's books include:
 * Between the Sexes: Toward a Christian Ethics of Sexuality  (Fortress and Paulist Presses, 1985;  seventh printing, l997, Fortress Press).
 * Religion and Artificial Reproduction: Inquiry into the Vatican Instruction on Human Life, with Thomas A Shannon (Crossroad Press, 1988).
 * Women and Sexuality (Paulist Press, l992)
 * 'Love Your Enemies': Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory (Fortress Press, l994)
 * Embodiment, Morality, and Medicine, edited with Margaret A. Farley (Kluwer Academic Publishers, l995)
 * Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
 * Christian Ethics: Problems and Prospects, in honor of James M. Gustafson, edited with James Childress (Pilgrim Press, l996)
 * Family: A Christian Social Perspective  (Fortress Press, 2000)
 * Catholic Ethicists on HIV/AIDS Prevention, ed. James F. Keenan, with Jon D. Fuller, Lisa
 * Sowle Cahill, and Kevin Kelly (New York: Continuum, 2000).
 * Bioethics and the Common Good (Marquette University Press, 2004)
 * Genetics, Theology, Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Conversation, edited (Crossroad, 2005).
 * Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, ed. Kenneth R. Himes, with Lisa
 * Sowle Cahill, Charles E. Curran, David Hollenbach, and Thomas Shannon, associate eds. (Washington,
 * D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005).
 * Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change (Georgetown University Press, 2005).  Winner of the Catholic Press Association First Place Award for Theology, 2005.
 * Sexuality and the U.S. Catholic Church: Crisis and Renewal, ed. with John Garvey and T. Frank Kennedy  (Crossroad, 2006).