Rev. Michael Sherwin, O.P., is a native of San Francisco, California. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in 1986, an M.A. in theology from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, in 1991, an M.A. in moral theology from the University of Notre Dame in 1997, and a Ph.D. in moral theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2001. He has held the Chair in Fundamental Moral Theology at Fribourg University since the Fall of 2001.

Fr. Sherwin’s already impressive scholarly achievements in moral theology, along with his excellent record of teaching, make him an ideal holder of the Myser Fellowship. Fr. Sherwin is the author of By Knowledge and By Love, Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), a volume that was awarded the Cardinal Journet Book Prize, presented by the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University, in 2006.

Among his other writings are the articles, “Four Challenges for Moral Theology in the New Century,” printed in the journal Logos (2003); “In What Straits They Suffered: St. Thomas’s Use of Aristotle to Transform Augustine’s Critique of Earthly Happiness,” published in the journal Nova et Vetera in 2005; and “Christ the Teacher in St. Thomas’s Commentary on the Gospel of John,” which was published in the volume Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas, brought out by The Catholic University of America Press in 2005. 

Fr. Sherwin has also served as translator from the French of three books, including Fr. Servais Pinckaers’s Morality: The Catholic View, a publication sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture at St. Augustine’s Press.

Fr. Sherwin has been an enormously successful teacher at Fribourg, of both graduate and undergraduate students. He teaches courses in Fundamental Moral Theology, the Moral Vision of the Early Church, Catholic Social Teaching, and Just War and Pacifist Traditions.

He is also an aficionado of the music of Dave Brubeck, and has published on Brubeck’s religious music in the journal, America.

While at the Center, Fr. Sherwin plans to expand into a book manuscript his original Logos article on the four challenges for moral theology in the new millennium. As Fr. Sherwin sees his project, contemporary theologians need to give more attention (1) to the history of their discipline and to how this history continues to influence their work; (2) to developments in the philosophy of nature that call into question modern assumptions about the relationship between morality and nature; (3) to the Christological character of grace and its implications for moral development; and finally (4) to developing a more deeply spiritual understanding of the vocation of the moral theologian.