We are kicking off the CatholicMoralTheology.com Commentary project! As we try to grow as a resource for Catholic moral theology on the web, we thought we could provide “commentaries” on major topics in Catholic moral theology as a valuable tool for students, teachers, or other interested people seeking to learn about some specific area of moral theology. Yet how to organize such a set of posts in a manner where the topics are both comprehensive and publicly available? We devised a list of topics based on section III of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (on morality, or “Life in Christ”), replacing the brief list of topics there on “The Human Community” with the list of chapters from the Compendium of Social Doctrine of the Church to flesh out Catholic social thought. We chose the Catechism (augmented by the Compendium) in order: a) to have a publicly available and comprehensive “prompt;” and, b) to model doing theology that takes seriously authoritative Church documents even while using them as a starting point (not as conversation enders) for examining theological topics in more depth.
Click on the “Commentary” tab above to see the list of topics, and the posts already completed. Our hope is to have a completed commentary by the end of 2011. We hope they are of service, and let us know if you have any recommendations!