David Decosimo Receives Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award
David Decosimo, assistant professor of theology at Boston University School of Theology and the Graduate Division of Religious Studies, has received a prestigious international award for young scholars: The Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.
The award is bestowed by the Forschungszentrum Internationale und Interdisziplinaere Theologie (FIIT) at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. It goes to ten scholars each year whose first book or doctoral dissertation in some way concerns the topic “God and Spirituality” (broadly understood). It welcomes applicants from all religious traditions, all academic fields, and from across the world. The ten awardees are chosen by an interdisciplinary and multi-religious board of distinguished scholars from 19 countries.
Decosimo received the award for his first book, Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), a book that examines Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of “pagan virtue.” The book delves into a question ever-present to people of all faiths—how to understand the virtues and moral excellence of people who have very different religious beliefs. “I’m deeply honored to receive this award and encouraged that such a diverse and distinguished international jury would affirm the importance and quality of this work for religious studies, theology, and our common life,” said Decosimo.
Decosimo says Ethics as a Work of Charity strives to treat religious differences with the seriousness they deserve while offering diverse religious and secular communities “better ways of imagining what divides them and more generous ways of being together.”
“Many of the differences that divide our world most deeply concern religion. As events of the last few months make horribly clear, these differences can easily feed violence and fuel a politics of hate,” Decosimo says. “So long as believers feel they must choose between faithfulness to their traditions and a generous posture to outsiders, that choice is unhappy and even destructive for all involved. Ethics as a Work of Charity is about dissolving that dichotomy and imagining a better way.”
“Boston University School of Theology is delighted to see this recognition of Dr. Decosimo’s work,” said Dean Mary Elizabeth Moore. “Ethics as a Work of Charity is a very important contribution to Thomist theology and a thoughtful treatment of questions that are central to Christian ethics and interfaith understanding.”
Decosimo’s research focuses on religious ethics and comparative theology in a pluralist and globalized world and on the theological thought of giants such as Aquinas, Augustine, and the Muslim thinker al-Ghazālī. His next book, Four Tasks of Christian Ethics, will present a new way of understanding the work of Christian ethics.
In May, Decosimo will join a week-long conference at University of Heidelberg where he and the other recipients will receive the award and give presentations on their forthcoming research. Decosimo says he looks forwarding to discussing an upcoming project, No Lord But God: Domination in Christianity and Islam: “That project continues the trajectory of my first book, expanding the inquiry to include explicit attention to Islam alongside Christianity, and centering on what these traditions, in dialogue with one another and political philosophy, can teach us about what it means to be politically free.”