David Decosimo.
Ethics    Religion    Politics

DavidDecosimo

A philosopher and theologian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — an Episcopal priest, and an advocate for liberal education. He is the author of Ethics as a Work of Charity and writes on religion, politics, and culture for the national press.

His work ranges across the great traditions of moral thought — pagan, Christian, Islamic, and modern, in figures from Aristotle and Aquinas to Augustine and al-Ghazālī — and turns on what it takes to live well together: to think clearly about the deepest things, to engage honestly with those with whom we disagree, and to move through real difference toward understanding, and even friendship.

David Decosimo is a philosopher and theologian, and an Episcopal priest. He is Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches in the School of Civic Life and Leadership and is Resource Faculty in the Philosophy department.

His scholarship sits at the intersection of moral philosophy and Christian theology, and reaches well beyond both — into ancient and secular ethics, the Islamic tradition, and enduring debates about freedom, justice, and the common good. He writes on virtue and the moral life, on grace and nature, on torture, lying, and political liberty, and on the art of understanding those with whom we disagree as fully and as fairly as we can — a discipline he finds at the very heart of Aquinas's own thought.

Before UNC he spent nearly a decade at Boston University, where he was a tenured professor of theology and ethics, affiliated faculty in philosophy, and director of the Institute for Philosophy and Religion; earlier he taught at Loyola University Maryland. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from the University of Virginia.

His first book, Ethics as a Work of Charity, won the international Manfred Lautenschlaeger Prize; a second, The Spirit of Christian Ethics, is under contract with Yale. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, and is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Students regularly describe his courses as among the best they have taken, and consistently as the ones in which they feel most free to think aloud and speak their minds.

Stanford University Press · 2014

Ethics as a Work of Charity

Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue

Manfred Lautenschlaeger Prize · Heidelberg University

The first full study of Aquinas on pagan virtue — of whether those who do not share our deepest convictions can lead truly virtuous lives. Against readers who make Aquinas choose between Augustine and Aristotle, the book shows that he welcomes outsiders and their virtues not as a betrayal of his Christian commitments but as their expression: he strives to be Augustinian by being Aristotelian, and the reverse. Beyond reinterpreting his ethics, it offers a model for welcoming the outsider — and her excellence — without giving up one's own convictions, whatever they may be.

  • A landmark book of lasting importance.Jordan Hylden · The Living Church
  • A major contribution to Aquinas interpretation.Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP · Vatican City
  • Utterly persuasive in its central claims.Jennifer Herdt · Yale University

At Stanford University Press →

Yale University Press · Forthcoming

The Spirit of Christian Ethics

A new account of what Christian ethics is and is for — drawn from the full sweep of the tradition — and of how and why Christian ethical life is at once so challenging, contentious, and compelling.

In progress

Religion's Freedom

Christianity, Islam, and Republican Liberty

How Christianity and Islam have each conceived and pursued political freedom — and a case, built from putting the two traditions in conversation, for liberty understood as freedom from domination.

  • Citizens of Babylon and the New Jerusalem: Aquinas on Polities and Their Virtues
    The Enduring Significance of Thomas Aquinas (Peeters) · 2023

    Aquinas on political communities and the distinctive virtues proper to each.

  • Ordering Reasons, Mediating Virtues
    Studies in Christian Ethics · 2023

    How and why Aquinas held that acquired and infused moral virtues cooperate rather than compete.

  • Skills without Values, Rallies without Virtues
    The Future of Philosophy of Religion (Springer) · 2020

    Against "Hipster Heideggerianism" — a critique of Dreyfus and Kelly's account of meaning and the sacred.

  • For Big Comparison: Why the Arguments against Comparing Entire Religious Traditions Fail
    Religion Compass · 2018

    A defense of large-scale comparison in the study of religion.

  • Political Freedom as an Islamic Value
    Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2018

    Recovering a republican, non-domination conception of freedom in the Islamic tradition and in al-Ghazālī.

  • The New Genealogy of Religious Freedom
    Journal of Law and Religion · 2018

    An immanent critique of genealogical attacks on religious freedom, and a pragmatist alternative.

  • Sin, Consent, and Apparent Confusion in Peter Abelard's Ethica
    Journal of Religion · 2018

    A close reading of Abelard on the relation of will, consent, and sin.

  • More to Love: Thomas Aquinas on Infused and Acquired Moral Virtue
    The Virtuous Life: Aquinas on the Moral Virtues (Peeters) · 2017

    Why, for Aquinas, Christians not only may but should pursue the acquired virtues.

  • Killing and the Wrongness of Torture
    Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics · 2016

    What distinguishes torture from just-war killing such that it, but not killing, is always wrong.

  • An Umma of Accountability: al-Ghazālī against Domination
    Soundings · 2015

    Liberty as non-domination in al-Ghazālī's political thought, read through Counsel for Kings.

  • Intrinsic Goodness and Contingency, Resemblance and Particularity
    Studies in Christian Ethics · 2012

    Two criticisms of Robert Adams's Finite and Infinite Goods.

  • Just Lies: Augustine's Ethics of Public Lying
    Journal of Religious Ethics · 2010

    Reading Augustine's treatments of lying and killing together to recover an unstated ethics of public lying.

  • Comparison and the Ubiquity of Resemblance
    Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2010

    What Nelson Goodman's account of similarity means for the comparative study of religion.

Decosimo is an Episcopal priest, ordained at Duke's Goodson Chapel in 2025. He serves as a chaplain to the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies at Duke Divinity School and as assisting priest at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Durham.

This calling embraces and is informed by his scholarship rather than standing in isolation from it. Both are ways of attending to what matters most, and of helping others attend to it too — in the lecture hall, on the page, and at the altar. As a theologian he writes about grace, virtue, and the moral life.

My hope, as a priest, is to make known and bear witness to the risen Christ — who is making all things new, and who unfailingly meets and gives himself to us in Scripture and the sacraments.David Decosimo

Essays & Commentary

  • How Ibram X. Kendi Broke Boston University
    The Wall Street Journal · 2023

    On a university subordinating itself to ideology — discussed in The New York Times, the New Statesman, the New York Post, and Il Foglio.

  • Why It's Wrong to Protest at a Judge's Home
    The Boston Globe · 2022

    On the limits of protest and the conditions of a shared civic life.

  • What Islam Could Teach Donald Trump about Democracy and Freedom
    The Washington Post · 2017

    Drawing on the Islamic tradition's resources for liberty; translated and republished in Indonesia.

Institutions & Academic Freedom

At Boston University, Decosimo directed the Institute for Philosophy and Religion and revived and chaired the Faculty Council's Academic Freedom Committee. Well before it was common — and often at real cost — he argued against turning any one ideology into institutional orthodoxy, and for a university ordered to open inquiry rather than conformity. A founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance and of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, he defends free inquiry against pressure from every direction, and argues for the renewal of liberal education.

The lecture and seminar series he has convened are studies in genuine pluralism, bringing figures as different as Eddie Glaude and Glenn Loury, Sally Haslanger and Zena Hitz, to the same stage. At UNC he organized the School of Civic Life and Leadership's first and largest public symposium, "Is Democracy on the Ballot?"; designed its flagship course on Israel and Palestine, which has taken students to the Holy Land; and has hosted frank public conversations on subjects as fraught as the nature of gender.

Elsewhere

He writes and comments on religion, ethics, and the life of the university, and is on X as @DavidDecosimo.

Beyond his own writing and teaching, Decosimo is regularly asked to help institutions navigate the hardest questions they face. University presidents and trustees have sought his counsel on academic freedom and institutional neutrality; new honors colleges and civic-education programs have drawn on his guidance; and he chaired the committee that defined his own university's core commitments to open inquiry and free expression.

He is especially concerned with the reform of higher education itself. Public trust has fallen sharply, and the demand for change is real and warranted — but genuine reform, he argues, must not be mistaken for its counterfeits. It cannot become the instrument of any party, cannot abandon merit or scholarly rigor, and cannot simply install one orthodoxy in place of another. His aim is to help leaders pursue change equal to the moment: change that renews the university's purpose rather than capturing it for a cause.

He works, too, at the frontier of what artificial intelligence means for human life. Universities seek him out on how to defend human personhood and the ends of liberal learning in an age of intelligent machines; churches and denominations, on how to think clearly and humanely about technology, culture, and the shaping of human lives.

He welcomes invitations to speak, lecture, and preach, in academic and church settings alike.