Sara Shady

Office: AC 307
Ext: 6174
P.O. Box: 76
Email: sshady@bethel.edu

Academic Degrees

Ph.D., University of South Carolina
B.A., Taylor University

Short Biography

I became a philosophy major after taking an Introduction to Philosophy course during my first semester in college. I was so excited that I could major in asking questions and wondering about things! After graduating from Taylor with a philosophy major and minors in history and sociology, I went to the University of South Carolina for graduate school. My dissertation was titled “The Self in Community: An Exploration of Authentic Being-with-others.” Moving from South Carolina, where we lived two hours from the beach and two hours from the mountains, was a big change for my husband (Jamie) and me, but we really enjoy living in Minnesota. We have one son (Gavin) and enjoy canoeing, camping, and going for walks. I also like to read and go to art museums, and I avidly watch Indiana University basketball and Green Bay Packer football.

Areas of Interest

I am primarily interested in social and political philosophy. Specifically, I focus on the construction of healthy communities and political societies. This involves consideration of some of the following issues: how unity can be found in the midst of diversity, how the self is constructed through dialogue, and the role of dialogue, trust, and responsibility in building and sustaining community. Many of the thinkers that I work with are 20th c. continental philosophers, including: Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, and John Macmurray. I also do work in environmental ethics and feminist philosophy and am interested in theories about the social construction of knowledge and reality.

Current Work

I am working on a few different projects. I am researching theories of community developed by religious socialists in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am also interested in trust theory, a recent development in political philosophy, because of its ability to help us understand what needs to happen on the interpersonal level to enable healthy communities at the social and political levels. And, I plan to begin working soon on a paper on environmental ethics using Buber’s notion of an I-Thou relationship with nature.

Classes Taught Spring 2008

Introduction to Logic
Christianity and Western Culture
The Modern Mind