David Decosimo

Fellow

Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

David Decosimo 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 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. 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 and of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy.

Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue, Stanford University Press, July 2014, 376pp. (2016 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Prize, sponsored by University of Heidelberg).

“Citizens of Babylon and the New Jerusalem: Aquinas on Polities and Their Virtues,” The Enduring Significance of Thomas Aquinas, eds. Anton ten Klooster and Harm Goris (Leuven: Peeters, 2023), 119-136.

“For Big Comparison: Why the Arguments against Comparing Entire Religious Traditions Fail,” Religion Compass, May 2018, 1-18.

“The New Genealogy of Religious Freedom,” Journal of Law and Religion, 33.2 (April 2018), 1-39.

“Political Freedom as an Islamic Value,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 86.4 (December 2018), 912-952.