Margaret Farley

Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M., Ph.D., (born April 15, 1935) is an American member of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy, is Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School. She taught Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School from 1971 to 2007.

Farley is the first woman appointed to serve full-time on the Yale School board, along with Henri Nouwen as its first Catholic faculty members. She is a past president of Catholic Theological Society of America.

Farley's controversial book, Just Love (2006), brought criticism and censure from the Holy See, specifically the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for moral views which oppose the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, but her book and views has received both support and endorsement from the groups Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Farley received the degrees of Bachelor's and Masters of Arts from the University of Detroit, followed by a degree in philosophy and a doctoral degree from Yale University She began her teaching career at the Yale Divinity School in 1971 and earned her doctorate there two years later. She appeared on the cover of the Yale Alumni Magazine in 1986 in connection with a feature article on teachers of note.

In 1986, Farley published Personal Commitments: Making, Keeping Breaking, which a reviewer in the Journal of Religion wrote "charts out what to watch for, when as a counselor, you are helping someone think through commitments" and focuses on "long-term commitments involving sexual intimacy". He added: "She does not display her erudition but hides it in footnotes. She expresses herself almost always in words available to the nonspecialist. She is courageous, breaking new ground." He singled out "the way she succinctly links the long heritage of Jewish and Christian thinking about 'covenant' with her earlier exploration of human relationships." A reviewer in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion called it "a valuable contribution to the literature of Christian ethics, and in particular to the discussion of the value of Christian love and special relationships. Farley has combined psychological subtlety and moral seriousness in such a way as to produce that rarity, a book that will be of great interest to the scholar, and yet would be useful in a parish or a counselor's office as well."

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