Margaret A. Farley papers

Margaret Farley, born on April 15, 1935, is a renowned authority in the areas of the history of ethics, feminist ethics, phenomenology and ethics, medical ethics, sexual ethics, ethics and spirituality, and responses to the AIDS pandemic in Africa. She is Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she taught from 1971 until 2007. She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Detroit before coming to Yale, where she received the M.Phil degree in 1970 and her Ph.D. in 1973. Farley is a member of the Catholic Sisters of Mercy and a previous president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. She was one of the first Catholic faculty members at Yale Divinity School and the first woman to receive tenure. Her accolades include receiving the John Courtney Murray Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1992, serving as president of the Society of Christian Ethics, the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2008, and honorary doctorates from numerous colleges and universities. A Festschrift in honor of Farley A Just and True Love: Feminism at the Frontiers of Theological Ethics, edited by Maura A. Ryan and Brian F. Linnane was published in 2007. Though Farley retired in 2007, her research continues.

Farley's most recent books include Compassionate Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical Ethics. Madeleva Lecture. (Paulist Press, 2002), Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (Continuum 2006), and Changing the Questions: Explorations in Christian Ethics (Orbis, 2015). Her work Just Love was denounced by the Vatican’s doctrinal office in 2012. Documentation related to this controversy is included in her papers. In addition to her extensive publishing of articles and books, Farley has served on the editorial boards of journals and served as Co-director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center 1998-2007, Director of Yale Divinity School Women’s Initiative on Gender, Faith, and Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa from 2001-2007, and Co-Director of the All Africa Conference: Sister to Sister (Roman Catholic Women and Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa), 2001- 2016. She has served on numerous ethics committees, including for Yale-New Haven Hospital, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. For a full listing of Farley's publications, awards, and activities, see the CVs in Series VI, Biographical Documentation.