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This chapter focuses on the theological foundations of leadership in Catholic schools. The Christian tradition offers valuable wisdom for leaders of Christian educational institutions. It reminds them that besides being their own persons, they are even before that members of a community blessed with different skills and gifts, committed to both intellectual and moral learning, aware and appreciative of the many forms that leadership takes, challenged by the social responsibilities that flow from the Gospel and, finally, sensitive to the fragility of everyone, especially themselves and those with whom they work and teach. Drawing explicitly upon these theologically grounded themes in the building of the school community of teachers and staff is something that leaders of Catholic schools can do that public school leaders are unable to do.

Almost all religions contain a code of morality, and in spite of the factthat there are moral codes and philosophies that do not rely upon anyreligion, it has been traditionally argued that there are at least threeimportant ways in which morality needs religion: (1) the goal of the morallife is unreachable without religious practice, (2) religion is necessary toprovide moral motivation, and (3) religion provides morality with itsfoundation and justification. These three ways in which morality may needreligion are independent, but I argue that there are conceptual connectionsamong the standard arguments for them. I identify reasons for resistance tothe idea that morality needs religion and then turn to arguments for each ofthe three ways in which morality may need religion. All three are related toclassic forms of the moral argument for the existence of God. I conclude bycomparing classic Divine Command Theory with my Divine Motivation Theory andargue that the latter has advantages over the former in the way it providesa theological foundation for ethics.

This chapter examines Isaac Mayer Wise’s grand aim of building up a visible edifice of American Judaism. The edifice would need appropriate theological foundations, and Wise wrote explicitly in that field. These writings responded to practical needs also: his two weekly newspapers had appetites which had to be satisfied. Constant reading gave him access to a vast corpus of literature, and he had an energetic mind which could draw on it immediately in reaction to events as they arose. Under such conditions consistency is not to be expected, and it is difficult to isolate a well-rounded statement of beliefs. One consistent thread, his stress on Sinaitic revelation and his belief that Mosaic teaching was being consummated in the American system, has already been mentioned. Here was no isolated off-the-cuff observation but a glimpse of a thread that was expressed throughout his life.