Christiana Peppard

Religious Ethics

Christiana Z. Peppard is a doctoral candidate in Religious Ethics in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. She graduated from Stanford University (2001) with a degree in Human Biology, where she designed a concentration on "Biological and Spiritual Notions of the Self" and received the Bingham Award for Innovation in Human Biology for her thesis project, which explored multidisciplinary perspectives on death, dying, and end-of-life care. She graduated summa cum laude with a Master of Arts in Religion (Ethics) from Yale Divinity School (2005) and received the Julia A. Archibald Award for High Scholarship as well as the Aidan Kavanagh Prize from the Institute of Sacred Music. Her dissertation, advised by Margaret A. Farley, is provisionally entitled "Valuing the Fugitive Resource." It takes as its starting point the global situation of fresh water scarcity and employs recent Catholic social teaching and moral anthropology in order to assess the types of value ascriptions that normatively define fresh water in an era of economic globalization. Beyond the dissertation, Peppard's areas of specialization include environmental ethics and environmental philosophy; analysis of the concept of "nature" in science, the history of philosophy, natural theology, feminist theory and natural law ethics; biomedical ethics at the edges of life; and poetry as an ethical methodology.

During her doctoral work, Peppard was a Teaching Fellow for Professors Gene Outka, Emilie Townes, and Miroslav Volf with Former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Prior to her graduate work, for two years Peppard was Assistant Coordinator of the Yale Center for Bioethics. During this time, she and Arthur Galston co-edited the book Expanding Horizons in Bioethics (Springer, 2005), which compiled original essays in three categories: Science and Society; Environmental Ethics, and Medical Ethics. Peppard's introduction explains the importance of "expanding the horizons" of conventional bioethical approaches in the ways enumerated by the volume's structure. She was also the longtime research assistant to National Book Award-winning author Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D.; she has trained as a hospital chaplain; and in 2003 she was a participant in in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar on ethics at the end of life.

Peppard's publications include two edited volumes, several chapters in books, an essay in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and two poems. Her service projects include a collaboration with Friends of the Earth-Middle East on a multidisciplinary resource about the Jordan River (to be made available to religious congregations and other organizations interested in the environmental, cultural, ethical and religious significance of the Jordan River). She has spoken at a range of venues about global fresh water issues. She serves as the Secretary of the Board of Directors of America magazine, the weekly publication and media ministry of the Jesuit Conference of the United States.

Through summer 2011, Peppard is Cathedral Scholar in Residence at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where she lives with her husband, Michael Peppard (a scholar of the New Testament), and their exuberant daughter.