Cristina Traina

Originally from Berkeley, California, Cristina Traina grew up in central Indiana and
eastern Pennsylvania.  She attended Princeton University, where she majored in
Religion.  She earned her M.A. in Religion and her Ph.D. in theology at the University of
Chicago Divinity School, where she studied with Anne Carr, David Tracy, Robin Lovin,
James Gustafson, and William Schweiker.

Traina came to Fordham in 2020 from Northwestern University, where she taught for
nearly 30 years in the Department of Religious Studies. She has been active in the
Society of Christian Ethics throughout her career, serving as Board member, as
President, as member of the 21st Century Committee, and as co-chair of the 2018-2020
taskforce that conducted a nation-wide survey of tenure-line and contingent faculty in
religious studies and theology. She has served on the editorial boards of various
journals.  She is an active member of the Catholic Theological Society of America, the
America Academy of Religion, and Societas Ethica.  A former member of the advisory
board for New Ways Ministry, she also writes occasionally for its blog, Bondings 2.0.

Professor Traina’s research focuses on critical and constructive Christian feminist
ethics, with a specialty in Catholic ethics.  Areas of special expertise include sexuality,
ethics of relationship, methodological questions, and moral agency, in particular
children’s moral agency.  She has additional interests in bioethics, migration,
intersectionality, and economic and political justice.

Ph.D. in Theology, University of Chicago Divinity School
M.A. in Religion, University of Chicago Divinity School
A.B. in Religion, Princeton University

Professor Traina’s research focuses on critical and constructive Christian feminist ethics, with a specialty in Catholic ethics. Areas of special expertise include sexuality, ethics of relationship, methodological questions, and moral agency, in particular children’s moral agency. She has additional interests in bioethics, migration, intersectionality, and economic and political justice.

In her current project, Children Out of Place and Moral Agency, she explores the implications for ethical conceptions of moral agency of children who are “out of place” according to Western liberal notions of childhood.  Each instance demands a different revision of moral agency and of childhood, and each questions American assumptions about and practices of childrearing and education.  They include children who work for pay; children who migrate unaccompanied; children who are recruited by armies and gangs; children active in labor movements and politics; and children who must decide how to respond to intersex or transgender identity.

Books

With Elsie M. Miranda, co-editor, The Meaning of Being Human : Synodal
Considerations (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2025).

Finitude, Feminism, and Flourishing: On Being Mortal, Like Everyone Else. 2023 Madaleva Lecture in Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 2024.

Erotic Attunement:  Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals. Chicago:  
University of Chicago Press, 2011.  

Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas. Washington, DC: 
Georgetown University Press, 1999.

Recent articles

“The Politics of Parental Conscience Rights,” Political Theology 26 (July 17, 2025), DOI:
10.1080/1462317X.2025.2533597.

“Children’s Moral Agency in Community: Lev Vygotsky on Moral Development,” The
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 45 no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2025): 39-57.

“Children and Moral Agency,” Cardozo International and Comparative Law Review, Fall
2024, Online Symposium—Rights of the Child (December 2024),
https://www.cardozociclr.com/post/fall-2024-online-symposia-rights-of-the-child

“Integrity, Vulnerability, and Temporality,” De Ethica 7, no. 3 (2023): Special Issue: Vulnerability and Integrity – Part 1: 30-46. https://doi.org/10.3384/de-ethica.2001-8819.2373

“Christian Feminist Theological Ethics,” St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe, et al. August 23, 2023. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/ChristianFeministTheologicalEthics

“Family/ies and Transcendence.” In The Transcendent Character of the Good: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, 193-209. Edited by Petruschka Schaafsma. New York: Routledge, 2023.

“Ecclesiology and Trans* Inclusion.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 42 no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2022): 363-382.

“’The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,’ Revisited: Theological Anthropology, Ethics, and Emotion.” The Human in a Dehumanizing World: Reexamining Theological Anthropology and Its Implications, 14-32. Ed. Jessica Coblentz. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2022.

“How Gendered Is Marriage?” In Sex, Love, and Families: Catholic Perspectives, 79-90.  
Edited by Jason King and Julie Hanlon Rubio.  Collegeville, MN:  Liturgical Press, 2020.

“Sources of Authority in Laudato Si’.” In Laudato Si’ and the Environment: Pope Francis'
Green Encyclical. Edited by Robert McKim.  New York:  Routledge, 2019. 

“Local Authoritarianism as a Barrier to Democracy.” Journal of Moral Theology 8, no. 2 
(June 2019): 113-121.

“Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Unwanted Pregnancy, Mercy, and Solidarity.” 
Journal of Religious Ethics 46, no. 4 (December 2018): 658-81.

“Holy Family or Holy Child?  Child Migrants as Vulnerable Agents.” In Unaccompanied Minor
Children:  Social, Legal, and Ethical Proposals. Edited by Hille Haker and Molly Greening, 141-60. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. 

“The Vice of ‘Virtue’:  Teaching Consumer Practice in an Unjust World.” Journal of Moral 
Theology 7, no. 1 (2018):13-27.