“Edith Stein and the Ethics of Renewal: Contributions to a Steinian Account of the Moral Task,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Forthcoming). Edith Stein and the Ethics of Renewal: Contributions to a Steinian Account of the Moral Task William E. Tullius Abstract. While Stein never developed an ethics of her own, her work is nonetheless suggestive of an ‘ethics of renewal’, which appears in nuce in various moments of her corpus. First, in her phenomenological treatises, Stein analyzes the ethical development of personality in the unfolding of the personal ‘core’ as responding to ever higher value domains. During the 1930’s, this becomes a project of living out a moral vocation bestowed by God. In Endliches und ewiges Sein, the moral life becomes a work of renewal in connection with the Teresian metaphor of the ‘interior castle’. Morality, for Stein, emerges from out of an inner, personal work of the soul’s conscious refurbishment according to its essential structure by coming to terms with the value-world and with God. This paper will attempt to develop Stein’s account of the nature of the moral task as renewal and some implications for moral theory. I. Introduction. It is well-known that Edith Stein never produced a systematic study on ethics. Rather, her various phenomenological and metaphysical works from across her corpus demonstrate an unwavering interest in philosophical anthropology, albeit from ever shifting and developing profiles and with differing questions forming the backdrop upon which her theory of the human person consistently comes to the fore. 1 From this core interest, her thought expands outward to investigation into the various phenomena which shed light upon her developing anthropological picture and which in turn acquire their own constitutive sense first and foremost in connection to the notion of ‘person’. In this connection, Stein’s project does demonstrate a consistent attention to the rootedness of the person in axiological/ethical contexts and vice versa. However, so far as Stein’s philosophical anthropology seems to touch upon ethics for the most 1 Antonio Calcagno, Lived Experience from the Inside Out: Social and Political Philosophy in Edith Stein (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 12, and Peter J. Schulz, “Toward the Subjectivity of the Human Person: Edith Stein’s Contribution to the Theory of Identity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2008): 161–176, at 163.