Santa Clara University

David DeCosse is director of campus ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.  His Ph.D. in theological ethics is from Boston College, and he teaches classes such as "The Ethics of War and Peace."

It's true--I like reading and writing about abstract theories of freedom in social and political life. But all that work and study is the top of the building. The foundation of the structure is attention to real life, where ethics is played out, surprising, shaded with doubt, or lit up like the sun on a green California hill. Blogs fit into that foundation.  They inhabit that space of real life where what happens hits us hard, evokes a bunch of opinions, then evokes a bunch more. Space is opened up in all this churn: Space to see things more clearly, live life more rightly.