Sheryl Overmyer

​It was probably my love of nineteenth-century novels that landed me in the spot I am today—a moral theologian with interests across the disciplines. As an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, I was asked to articulate the relation of religious and scientific judgments, to adjudicate tradition’s notion of the common good against modern economic and political arrangements, to relate ancient wisdom to its postmodern counterpart. I pursued similar questions into graduate studies at Duke University. My doctoral dissertation was moral and eclectic, drawing upon a medieval theologian and late medieval English poet in equal parts. In 2010, I joined the Department of Catholic Studies at DePaul. The department works hard to depict the beauty of human existence “not as a number of isolated precepts imposed by ecclesiastical authority,” in the words of Christopher Dawson, “but as a cosmos of spiritual relations embracing heaven and earth and uniting the order of social and moral life with the order of divine grace.”