Barrett, Melanie Susan

Melanie Barrett is Assistant Professor of Moral Theology in the Department of Christian Life at University of Saint Mary of the Lake, a graduate Catholic seminary in Mundelein, Illinois. She completed her Ph.D. in Religious Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Love’s Beauty at the Heart of the Christian Moral Life: The Ethics of Catholic Theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar

2009 0-7734-4649-4
This study develops the ethical theory implicit in the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a prominent twentieth-century Swiss Catholic theologian. Balthasar’s attempt to critically retrieve the concept of beauty for Christian theology yields important ethical insights, culminating in an aesthetic and dramatic theory of ethics: one in which the perception of the beauty of God’s love in Christ becomes a foundational experience for moral formation and ongoing ethical discernment.