Gene Outka

Dwight Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics

Gene OutkaGene Outka, BA, University of Redlands, MA and Ph.D. Yale University, 1967, faculty member at Yale since 1975: you are one of the most respected scholars in the field of Religious Studies. Your outstanding reputation throughout the nation and beyond, is based on your seminal contributions to the study of Christian ethics, embodied in your classic work on Agape: An Ethical Analysis, published by Yale University Press in 1972, and later translated into Japanese and Korean. Other signal writings have appeared on religion and morality, social justice, biomedical ethics, and public morality. Yours has been the art of showing with tact, analytical rigor, and grace the way forward to a responsible ethics for church and state. As mentor to undergraduates, and Divinity School students, you have trained a generation of leading lights in multiple disciplines. You have directed doctoral dissertations for twenty-nine graduate students now placed in many of the greatest colleges and universities throughout the United States. For three years you chaired the Department of Religious Studies, including 1997 when you organized what has been described as “one of the best departmental reunion programs in the Graduate School’s history.”

In the world beyond Yale you have been a distinguished lecturer at academic and public settings throughout the Anglo-American world. Your service to the guild encompasses your entire academic career, highlighted by such appoints as Vice-President and later President of the Society of Christian Ethics, and long time Member of the Editorial Board, Journal of Religious Ethics. As you retire from active teaching, but not, we are certain, from your research and writing, the Yale faculty proudly thanks you for being such an eminent member of this ancient and venerable “company of scholars.”

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans