Connection and Vulnerability: An Appreciation of James F. Keenan’s ‘Style’ of Ethics

Abstract

This essay highlights the distinctive contribution that James F. Keenan SJ has made to the field of theological ethics. It analyses his work through the lens of “style,” as the term is deployed by John O’Malley. It suggests that Keenan’s style is performative, based in theology of connection, empathy and solidarity. The essay examines aspects of his work, specifically his retrieval of virtue and his recent work on theological anthropology rooted in vulnerability and recognition. It suggests that in each case his performative style enacts and displays the relationality that, for Keenan, is at the heart of Christian ethics. The essay also notes Keenan’s practices of solidarity within the academy that flow from his ethic of connection, and that illustrate further its performativity. The essay ends with a brief reflection on continuing the agenda which he has set.

Theological ethics ¹ in the Catholic tradition has undergone profound change in the post-Vatican II era. The classicism that dominated Neo-Scholasticism has been replaced by a theology attuned to historical consciousness, while the essentialist theological anthropology that characterised the manualist tradition has been superseded by a dynamic concept of the moral subject and of moral reasoning. Moreover, Catholic theological ethics has become more determinedly ecumenical, humanistic, and pluralistic in its approach to foundational issues as well as in relation to the resources from which it draws. ² Analyses of the impact and significance of these developments are many. However, while the transformation wrought by the generation which catalysed the theological agenda of Vatical II is well rehearsed, the significance of the conceptual and methodological developments instituted by the next generation is less well appreciated. This essay adds to the small number of existing assessments of this post-Vatican II generation of Catholic theological ethicists ³ by considering the contribution that James F. Keenan SJ has made to the field. ⁴

Keenan’s teaching and writing spans four decades and is extensive in its ambition, remit and volume. Canisius Professor at Boston College where he has spent much of his academic career to date, Keenan has written foundational theological works on conscience, agency, moral reasoning, and casuistry as well as in applied theological ethics, especially in the fields of bioethics, sexual ethics, institutional church ethics and university ethics. His historical and textual work, on Thomas Aquinas, ⁵ on casuistry, ⁶ and on St Alphonsus di Liguori ⁷ has been ground-breaking, and through the decades he has developed noteworthy and often challenging analyses of the theological works and encyclicals of Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. ⁸ Additionally, his time at the helm of the iconic “Moral Notes” series, published annually in Theological Studies has been instrumental in orienting the agenda for Catholic theological ethics since 2000. ⁹ While a comprehensive analysis of such an extensive corpus is beyond the scope of this essay, my intention here is to illuminate what I regard to be the signature “style” of Keenan’s work, namely its performativity, and in so doing hope to provide a useful lens through which to appreciate his work.

Historian John O’Malley has argued that Vatican II was most fundamentally “about style, about the ‘how’ of the church.” ¹⁰ Recognising the likely resistance to such a seemingly superficial evaluation, O’Malley asks “Style? Is that really important?” answering “Indeed it is. The style of our nation is democratic. Without that style, there is no United States. What made Michelangelo a great painter was not what he painted but how he painted, his style.” ¹¹ Regarding the style of Vatican II O’Malley argues “no other aspect of Vatican II sets it off so impressively from all previous councils and thereby suggests its break with ‘business as usual.’ No other aspect so impressively indicates that a new mode of interpretation is required if we are to understand it and get at its ‘spirit.’” ¹² O’Malley argued that “content and mode of expression are inextricably intertwined,” and that “in dealing with style we are at the same time dealing with content.” ¹³ Keenan has often adapted O’Malley’s reflection on style ¹⁴ affirming with O’Malley that style is “not something over against substance” but rather “more like a way of proceeding” ¹⁵ that conveys “a resonance with a particular type of culture.” ¹⁶

When one examines Keenan’s corpus through the lens of style, one sees a body of work that is distinctive. Part I of this essay discusses what I regard to be the foundational elements of Keenan’s distinctive style and aims to demonstrate with O’Malley, that in Keenan’s style we find the ultimate expression of his values, and his sense of the mission and purpose of theology. In naming Keenan’s style performative, I adapt Judith Butler’s definition to suggest that his ethics “is a discursive practice that enacts that which it names,” ¹⁷ which in Keenan’s case is the enactment of a culture of connection, empathy and solidarity. Part II considers some of the key themes and concerns with which Keenan has engaged, affirming with O’Malley that substance and style are inextricably intertwined. The focus of this section is Keenan’s work on the moral life, paying particular attention to his retrieval of virtue as well as his more recent work on theological anthropology rooted in vulnerability and recognition. In each case his performative style enacts and displays the relationality that, for Keenan, is at the heart of Christian ethics. This performativity is also in view in his work on church ethics and university ethics, fields that are close to home, but still under-examined, as Keenan has so forcefully argued. In this context one sees time and again that Keenan uncovers neglected dimensions of the church’s moral tradition, names complicity in institutional failures and attends to the systemic erasure of certain voices in theology and society. He is both advocate and activist, concerned not only with retrieving and reinventing the theological tradition but also with engaging and serving the church community. Part III focuses on Keenan’s practices of solidarity within the academy that flow from his ethic of connection, and that illustrate further its performativity. The essay ends with a brief reflection on continuing the agenda which he has set.

Narrativity and Connection

In his keynote address to the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) in 2009, Keenan departed from the conventional style of the academy and began his lecture with a detailed account of his cancer diagnosis and the fear it engendered in him. Entitled “Impasse and Solidarity in Theological Ethics,” ¹⁸ Keenan moved from this personal narrative to create a compelling ethical discourse on suffering and solidarity. From this starting-point he developed a searing critique of the detached, rationalist style of theology that is prized in academia, and made the case for a change in the way moral theological reflection proceeds. Indeed, this can be regarded as one of Keenan’s most important essays, not only because of the personal narrative mode through which he theologises, but also because the essay does important theological work on the relationality that anchors the moral life, and on the moral practice of solidarity. Additionally, he introduces the themes of vulnerability and recognition, and the concerns of university and academic ethics which would later become central to his theological ethics.

Theology had already taken a narrative turn, so that was not particularly distinctive. Especially from the 1970s, scholarly analysis of the religious ideas embedded in narrative emerged as a key mode of theological reflection. ¹⁹ The narratives of interest were primarily the biblical narratives, the classics of (mostly) Western culture and the newly articulated narratives, often in fiction, poetry and theatre, of traditionally silenced groups, including women. Paul Ricoeur, Hans Frei and Stanley Hauerwas, as well as feminist theologians Sallie McFague and Carol Christ, turned to narrative as a venue for theological insight. Yet for many, the focus was on narrative at a remove, as for example with the theologising of literary classics. A small number of theologians and ethicists did engage the narratives of their own lives as a source of theological insight. For example, Stanley Hauerwas has used personal narrative in his theological reflection ²⁰ and it has also been an important dimension of the theological work of Emile Townes, ²¹ M. Shawn Copeland ²² and others who have drawn on their personal narratives to highlight the exclusions and violence of gender and white privilege that have been threaded through Christian history, with the purpose of revisioning theological ethics in ways that address these systemic failures. Keenan’s theological ethics sits within this narrative turn, although there are also other contexts, including the post-Vatican II renewal, in which his work is appropriately located. However, particularly in the context of Catholic theological ethics, Keenan’s work is unique in theologising explicitly, consistently, and unapologetically, from his own personal, often threshold experiences. Moreover narrativity is not simply a technique, but is performative. It is a pathway to connection, empathy, and solidarity. It is fundamental to Keenan’s theological method because as a genre it is unsurpassed in its capacity to enunciate our shared humanity.

For Christians the formative narrative is of Jesus’s redemptive love and engaging this narrative, as narrative, has also been a fundamental pillar of Keenan’s style of theological ethics. His celebrated D’Arcy Lectures published as The Moral Life ²³ begin by inviting readers to imaginatively inhabit the grief of the disciples gathered in the Upper Room after Jesus’s crucifixion, and in successive lectures Keenan continues this invitation to imaginative identification, with Mary Magdalen, with the Good Samaritan, and with the father of the Prodigal Son. The imaginative identification with these stories of grief, vulnerability, and recognition become the cornerstone of the theological anthropology in these D’Arcy Lectures. Here Keenan’s distinctive engagement with the biblical narrative is on display. Although to the fore in these lectures, this way of engaging the Bible as an invitation to the moral practice of solidarity is evident throughout his entire corpus. One sees it in his more pastorally oriented writings, for example his Moral Wisdom: Lessons and Texts from the Catholic Tradition ²⁴ and The Works of Mercy: The Heart of Catholicism, ²⁵ and also in his collaboration with his colleague the late Daniel Harrington. This collaboration with Harrington generated the co-written books Jesus and Virtue Ethics: Building Bridges Between New Testament Studies and Moral Theology in 2002, and Paul and Virtue Ethics in 2010 ²⁶ each exemplifying an approach that combines textual precision, hermeneutical sophistication, theological insight and imaginative identification. Narrative also animates his embrace of virtue as the fundamental mode of Christian ethics, since it is often through the imaginative identification with narratives of empathy and solidarity, as well as with the witness of exemplars, that formation in virtue and the virtues is made possible. We see this not only in Jesus and Virtue Ethics and Paul and Virtue Ethics, but also in Virtues for Ordinary Christians ²⁷ and Commandments of Compassion. ²⁸

Keenan’s prioritisation of narrative and impetus for affective connection is evident also in his historical and textual studies. Although rarely noted, Keenan’s historical and textual work is never just about the texts, their meaning and significance. Rather, alongside Keenan’s textual and historical analysis is an invitation to enter the lives, writings, and worlds of St Thomas Aquinas, St Ignatius, St Alphonsus de Liguori, and the casuists, as well as the worlds of the monks and laypersons of the Middle Ages who were dedicated to the corporal works of mercy. He attends to the materiality as well as to the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of these worlds. Moreover, he gives readers an insight, not only into the worlds of the authors of these great works, but also into the worlds of the readers and hearers; that is, to the worlds of the communities for whom this writing and preaching was intended. This approach not only serves to retrieve those aspects of the tradition that have been obscured or lost, but it also serves as a path of connection between the communities of Christians past and present, and thereby as a way of engaging the tradition in the constructive task of contemporary theological ethics. We see this approach in embryonic form in The Context of Casuistry, ²⁹ and it becomes more pronounced in his multiple essays through the 1990s and 2000s, whether on virtue ³⁰ or on casuistry. ³¹ It is especially evident in his recent A History of Catholic Theological Ethics, ³² in which he brings the diversity and creativity of the Church’s moral tradition alive through an analysis that connects readers to the human stories, and the exemplary human story of Incarnation, of which we are a part. For Keenan, history is never only, or even primarily about the past, but rather is a means of connection and a call to enact, to perform, the moral practice of solidarity in the present and for the future.

Vulnerability and Recognition

This relationality also animates Keenan’s virtue-based theology. His retrieval of the language of virtue has been a vital resource for the person-centred ethics that has characterised much of the post-Vatican II moral theology. Not only has his Goodness and Rightness in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae ³³ been instrumental in the recovery of virtue and the virtues in Catholic ethics, but it also made the case for a particular reading of virtue in Aquinas, liberating it from neo-scholastic interpretations, retrieving it and highlighting its dynamic character, its contextuality and its teleological nature. His subsequent recalibration of virtue through his relational anthropology has opened a rich seam of theological innovation that he and his former students have advanced. In his 1995 essay “Proposing Cardinal Virtues,” ³⁴ he highlighted some of the inadequacies of the classic Thomistic list of the cardinal virtues arguing that a different account, arising from a relational anthropology is required. Retrieving, while also developing Aquinas, Keenan advanced the insight that the cardinal virtues arise from our mode of being as relational, arguing that “virtues do not perfect what we have or what we do; rather they perfect who we are in the mode of our being, which is as being in relationships. Virtues do not perfect powers or ‘things’ inside of us, but rather ways that we are.” ³⁵ In this relational context he proposed his own list of cardinal virtues, which are justice, fidelity, self-care, and prudence, explaining, “as persons, we are relational in three ways: generally, specifically, and uniquely” ³⁶ and each demands a cardinal virtue. He goes on to explain that, “as relational beings in general, we are called to justice, as a relational being specifically, we are called to fidelity and as relational beings uniquely, we are called to self-care.” ³⁷ The fourth cardinal virtue is prudence, and in this way of viewing the cardinal virtues as they reflect our relationality, he explains that prudence then determines “what constitutes the just, faithful, and self-caring way of life for an individual.” ³⁸ And while his work on the virtues has evolved over time, most especially through his signature focus on mercy, his insistence on this relational structuring of the virtues has been consistent.

This relational structuring of the virtues has been extraordinarily generative, not only for Keenan’s own theological ethics, but also for the development of virtue ethics. While highly conversant with the different analytical frameworks adopted in the tradition through the centuries, and while recognising the value that each has brought to the moral tradition, seen for example in his work on casuistry, nonetheless one can conclude that for Keenan, Christian ethics is best understood as an ethic centred around virtue. For Keenan, analytical reflection on the moral life is best pursued through the lens of virtue. Yet his centring of virtue is never strident or exclusionary. Rather, he recognises the value of alternative discourses, for example of rights, and engages these discourses through the prism of virtue, thus opening them for further elaboration. His reading of the tradition moreover often brings to light its fundamental virtue-orientation, an orientation that has often been obscured, or that has fossilised through centuries of decontextualised interpretation.

Indeed, one could argue that his most recent, magisterial history A History of Catholic Theological Ethics is precisely a retrieval of the moral tradition through the lens of virtue. This is seen in his summation of the first 500 years as “a narrative of hospitality, solidarity and corporal and spiritual works of mercy.” ³⁹ It is evident, with even more significant implications for conventional interpretations of the history of the moral tradition in his argument, contra Mahony, that the history of Catholic ethics from the patristic era to the moral manuals is not, as has been the consensus view, a history of moral pathology, or “a miasma of sin.” ⁴⁰ Rather it is, according to Keenan, the history of a people journeying towards holiness. It is the story of a pathway to holiness “which begins with the Eucharist and a community of faith, but which couples with a myriad of spiritual pathways that develop through the next centuries.” ⁴¹ These examples highlight how Keenan’s recentring of virtue has not only retrieved important aspects of the Catholic moral tradition to galvanise its renewal, but, in addition, the historiography that his work has occasioned has been an important catalyst for theological innovation and has substantiated O’Malley’s insight on style, namely that “the what of speech and the how of speech are inseparable.” ⁴²

In his centring virtue Keenan has also analysed the dynamics of moral development by considering what “growth in virtue” entails. He challenged the tendency towards perfectionist ethics, arguing that the cardinal virtues, of justice, fidelity, self-care and prudence “do not purport to offer a picture of the ideal person,” nor are they “the last word on virtue,” but rather they are among the first, providing the bare essentials for right human living.” ⁴³ He has developed this reflection to high acclaim, and with significant impact for the community in his pastorally oriented The Works of Mercy and Virtues for Ordinary Christians. Here he insists that virtue ethics pushes Christian ethics to pay greater attention to the moral lives of ordinary individuals as we strive to live morally. Virtue ethics, he argues, is the ethics of ordinary life; it is performative, and iterative, and is characterised by mercy, which, as Keenan has memorably insisted is “the willingness to enter the chaos of another.” ⁴⁴ This performative ethic is expressed in the works of mercy, both the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy. Keenan gives a contemporary rendering of this traditional, and somewhat unfamiliar language of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The corporal works of mercy are visiting the prisoner, sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry, giving drink to those who are thirsty, burying the dead, visiting the sick, and clothing the naked; what today is called the work of social justice. The spiritual works of mercy, as Keenan explains, are practices that train us in vigilance and sympathy, that orient our concern to the marginalised and call us to a new vision of inclusion; in the traditional language of the spiritual works of mercy, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, and comfort the afflicted; practices that call us to be reconciling spirits in our communities and in our world; in the traditional language of the spiritual works of mercy to admonish the sinner, forgive offenses and bear wrongs patiently; and the call to prayer and to the experience of its transformative power. Moreover, for Christians, the liturgy, and especially the Eucharist is a space in which we experience and are reminded of God’s mercy ⁴⁵ and where we come to greater understanding of what our growth in virtue entails.

For Keenan, our growth in virtue is a response to the divine initiative. This dynamic of divine invitation and human response is influenced by the work of Keenan’s Doktorvater Josef Fuchs, and of Bernard Häring and Klaus Demmer, and especially by Enda McDonagh. Keenan’s work on moral agency, conscience and the nature of moral responsibility is entirely shaped by this invitational framework. However, whereas Häring, Fuchs and Demmer focused primarily on the invitational framework as encountered in the lives of individual moral agents, Keenan (particularly in his later work) followed McDonagh and re-oriented the traditional personalist focus to emphasise the social nature of our ontology.

It was noted earlier that Keenan centres his D’Arcy Lectures around the foundational stories of grief, vulnerability and recognition that are at the heart of the Christian narrative and he invites readers to imaginatively inhabit these narratives in order to understand the moral life to which Christians are called. Through his D’Arcy Lectures he develops his theological anthropology in new directions, echoing the insights of philosopher Gillian Rose whose meditation at the end of her life spoke of accepting “the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds.” ⁴⁶ Keenan’s theological anthropology highlights the vulnerability that is at the heart of our humanness, and which animates his ethics of connection. Grief, vulnerability and recognition are in fact the cornerstones of the “ontologically social anthropology” ⁴⁷ developed in these lectures.

Explaining the frame-altering significance of an ontologically social anthropology, he says “in this project of preparing for the moral life I am interested in a theological anthropology that takes seriously not that we are social before we are personal, or personal before we are social, but that we are in our natures, or as the philosophers would say we are, ‘ontologically’ (that is, in our being) connected before we are either and therefore the act of recognition will always somehow refract to this underlying prior state of us as connected.” ⁴⁸ This underlying prior state of persons as connected is reflected in our pre-personal (ontological) vulnerability, is what constitutes us as human and created in God’s image, and is what grounds our capacity for moral responsiveness. ⁴⁹ The first movement in the moral life, Keenan argues, is to be vulnerably disposed to the other, and he engages the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, Roger Burggraeve, and Enda McDonagh to define vulnerability as our capacity to be capaciously responsive. The moral life begins with our vulnerable disposition, from which recognition is made possible, and with Axel Honeth he notes that each person needs recognition to flourish, and that mutual recognition is the constitutive foundation of both the personal and social realisation of the good life. ⁵⁰ Vulnerability engenders recognition, which leads then to what Keenan calls the “conscience question, namely, ‘now what do I do’.” ⁵¹ Moreover as Judith Butler insists this “most individual question of morality—how do I live this life that is mine? [i.e. Keenan’s now what do I do] is bound up with biopolitical questions distilled in forms such as these: Whose lives matter? (Whose lives do not matter as lives, are not recognisable as living, or count only ambiguously as alive) . . . Whose lives are grievable and whose are not.” ⁵²

Grief, as Keenan reminds us, provides an epiphany of our human connectedness, and he engages Butler’s searing critique of the ideologies and institutions that render certain lives ungrievable ⁵³ to explore the social construction of recognition and its implications for the moral life. His recent work on the structures of domination through which pervasive racism is constructed, draws on the work of M. Shawn Copeland, Bryan Massingale, and Andre Prevot, to argue for a radical decentring of the dominant caste of whiteness that has rendered so many lives ungrievable. ⁵⁴ Similarly, his work on clericalism and hierarchicalism interrogates the structures of domination premised on white male privilege that have rendered the lives of women and children unseen and ungrievable. ⁵⁵ This uncompromising gaze on cultural, societal, and institutional infrastructures of domination provides the clarion call for the development of an ethics of connection, an ethic that at its core engages our shared vulnerability and that can pave pathways to virtue within cultures, societies and institutions. In his most recent work, he turns his focus to organised collectives in order to examine their role in either constructing and amplifying, or resisting and interrupting the infrastructure of domination, ⁵⁶ and in his prescient work on university ethics ⁵⁷ and church ethics ⁵⁸ he not only denounces the cultural and structural infrastructures that enable the logic of domination, but he also builds a moral vision based on our shared vulnerability, which animates an ethic of connection in which individuals can flourish and in which the common good can be secured.

The Practices of Solidarity

Embedded in Keenan’s style are other important features of his way of doing theological ethics, in which we see its performativity at work. These include his collaborative spirit, his global-orientation and his allyship. Each is anchored in the central role that connection, empathy, and solidarity play in his work, and each is fundamental to the impact that his practice as well as his writing has had on the field. His collaborators include former student Joseph J. Kotva, Jr. with whom he edited one of the first moral theological collections to analyse the crisis of ethics in the Church—the 1999 work Practice What You Preach: Virtues, Ethics and Power in the Lives of Pastoral Ministers and Their Congregations. ⁵⁹ He has also collaborated on this theme with Jean Bartunek and Mary Ann Hinsdale, ⁶⁰ and recently with Daniel J. Fleming and Hans Zollner. ⁶¹ Moreover, in addition to uncompromising and clear-sighted moral critiques of the theological, cultural and institutional dimensions of Catholicism that facilitated and enabled this abuse, advanced through his academic work, Keenan has also been a fearless voice in ecclesial and US national politics, insisting on accountability and reform. There have also been collaborations with Grant Gallicho on Amoris Laetitia; ⁶² Antonio Autiero on vulnerability, domination and the fatherhood of God; ⁶³ Matthew Gaudet on contingent faculty, ⁶⁴ and Mark McGreevy on street homelessness; ⁶⁵ as well as collaborations with his colleagues Lisa Sowle Cahill, Kristin Heyer, Andrea Vicini, and Ken Himes. With this consistent commitment to collaboration over his entire career, Keenan challenges the individualism and isolationism that is emblematic of our scholarly formation, professional lifestyle and institutional structures, ⁶⁶ and through these collaborations enacts, or performs an academic practice based in solidarity.

His global orientation and commitment to giving voice to theologians beyond the USA and Europe is also performative and has certainly transformed Catholic ethics in the twenty-first century. His vision for Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC), first articulated in 2003 in Leuven, has grown deep roots over the last twenty years and has altered the landscape of Catholic ethics. Rooted in an ethic of connection, CTEWC has worked to shine a light on the concerns with which theological ethics engages world-wide and to amplify the works of ethicists whose voices have long been ignored in the Western-centric theology of the academy. The CTEWC mission “to appreciate the challenge of pluralism; to dialogue from and beyond local culture and to interconnect within the world church not dominated solely by a northern paradigm” ⁶⁷ continues to shape Catholic theological ethics; it has also reverberated in other theological fora, and has established the moral and academic standard for theological engagement into the future. His “Moral Notes” have also advanced this commitment to strengthening the voices of theologians from the South, fostering a theology that is global and cross-cultural in orientation. So too has his writing and teaching collaborations with Agnes Brazal, Aloysius Cartagenas and Eric Genilo from the Philippines, ⁶⁸ and with Shaji George Kochuthara from India, Ronaldo Zacharias from Brazil, and the late Yiu Sing Lúcás from China. ⁶⁹

Finally in the context of Keenan’s performative style which, with O’Malley and Keenan I suggest “conveys a resonance with a particular type of culture,” it is important to note Keenan’s solidarity and allyship. While the adequacy of the term allyship is debated, ⁷⁰ it is used here to reference Keenan’s consistent practice of interrogating and taking responsibility for his own privilege as he engages with issues of identity formation and social justice. ⁷¹ We see this in his determinedly self-critical work to investigate his male privilege and its implications for his commitment to feminism, ⁷² his landmark work on university ethics and contingent faculty, ⁷³ and his analysis of how white self-sufficient masculinity ⁷⁴ has shaped both the structures of institutional Catholicism and his own experience therein. Keenan is clear-sighted about his own positionality, acknowledging the challenge inherent in Timothy McGee’s insight that “white efforts at solidarity—asking how to help, seeking to be a good ally or destroying their own whiteness—often become subtle quests to regain control over white identity.” ⁷⁵ He engages the work of Cone, Massingale and Copeland who uncover the racialising logic at the core of white supremacy ⁷⁶ and its pernicious outworkings that have deformed the Christian tradition, and he insists that radical work of self-interrogation must be done at both the personal and institutional levels. Keenan also brings this critical lens to his landmark work on clericalism, and on what he perceptively describes as clericalism’s father, hierarchicalism, ⁷⁷ where, in a series of uncompromising articles, lectures, and pastorally oriented engagements, Keenan continues his solidarity with laity and clergy who suffer at the hands of the Church’s unaccountable power, challenging “the specific vice that infects our leadership, (that is) hierarchicalism,” ⁷⁸ and working for a change in culture and structure that would reflect the servant leadership that ought to embody the vulnerable grace of episcopal ordination. ⁷⁹

There is no doubt that Keenan’s theological ethics has been shaped by the classic post-Vatican II renewal of moral theology represented by Curran, Farley, Häring, and McDonagh, and he has contributed to that renewal in profound ways, often via the classic modes of historical retrieval or discursive development of concepts. However, in parallel and growing in confidence and impact through the years, Keenan has developed a narrative style, rooted in his own story of vulnerability, empathy, and connection, and influenced significantly by the work of Irish theologian Enda McDonagh. ⁸⁰ This distinctive style has become the springboard for his theological creativity and for his service of church and world. In the words of John O’Malley, “a style choice is an identity choice,” that a shift in style is not “a technique or a strategy but an outward expression of the adoption of an inner pattern of values. Style, sometimes misunderstood as merely an ornament of speech, an outer garment adorning thought, is really the ultimate expression of meaning.” ⁸¹

Continuing the Agenda of Renewal

Through his writing, teaching, mentoring, and connecting, Keenan has embodied a dynamic mode of theological engagement in Catholic ethics, adopting a performative style based in imaginative identification, connection and solidarity. His has been a formative presence in the field of Catholic theological ethics for more than four decades and he has developed the moral tradition in innovative and unique ways. Nor has his impact on the field been limited to his research and teaching. Rather in his many leadership roles he has intentionally sought to reform the practices of the profession, to make them more inclusive, collaborative and engaged.

Keenan’s work has engaged many fields in its agenda of renewal, so an analysis of how scholars have built and can build on his contribution is a task for another day. However, one example, namely his retrieval and renewal of virtue ethics, can usefully serve as a context to note how scholars have developed this work. There was already an interest in virtue ethics from the 1980s in Catholic moral theology, influenced in part by the renewed philosophical interest in the virtues, as seen in the works of Frederick S. Carney, ⁸² William Frankena ⁸³ and Alisdair MacIntyre. ⁸⁴ In the Catholic tradition the interest was also driven by the return to the sources, and particularly to Aquinas. Among post-Vatican II moral theologians there was a determination to read Aquinas in his context and not through the received lens of Neo-Scholasticism. This approach is evident in Jean Porter’s influential works, The Recovery of Virtue ⁸⁵ and Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law, ⁸⁶ both of which played a key role in the retrieval of virtue for contemporary Catholic ethics. Keenan’s work fits within the context of this retrieval and in recent decades virtue ethics has been restored to a central position at the heart of Catholic theological ethics.

With this restoration of virtue ethics have come developments in significant new directions. Catholic ethicists including Patricia Bettie Jung ⁸⁷ and Christopher Vogt ⁸⁸ have elaborated virtue ethics in a feminist key, ⁸⁹ while James Bretzke, ⁹⁰ Yiu Sing Lúcás, ⁹¹ David Clairmont, ⁹² and Daniel Scheid ⁹³ have each engaged with inter-religious and comparative discourses on virtue to reshape theological ethics. Arguably of most significance in the evolution of virtue ethics has been its recasting as social ethics. ⁹⁴ As noted earlier, Keenan was alive to this perspective, especially through the work of Enda McDonagh, and it has become more pronounced in his later work. Indeed, some of Keenan’s former students have played a major role in this evolution of virtue ethics. Works including Daniel Daly’s The Structures of Virtue and Vice, ⁹⁵ Mary Jo Iozzio’s Disability Ethics and Preferential Justice: A Catholic Perspective, ⁹⁶ Conor Kelly’s Racism and Structural Sin: Confronting Injustice with the Eyes of Faith, ⁹⁷ Chris Vogt’s Patience, Compassion, Hope, and the Christian Art of Dying Well, ⁹⁸ and Kate Ward’s Wealth, Virtue and Moral Luck: Christian Ethics in an Age of Inequality ⁹⁹ each develop the tradition of virtue in a way that honours the “ontologically social anthropology” ¹⁰⁰ of the person. Each of these works has developed virtue ethics in a social key, so that virtue is no longer conceptualised primarily through the lens of the individual moral character. Moreover, the festschrift in Keenan’s honour, edited by former students Christopher P. Vogt and Kate Ward, ¹⁰¹ showcases further the many other ways that virtue ethics has been developed by a new generation of scholars.

In terms of continuing and expanding the agenda of reform, Keenan’s recent work on vulnerability and recognition holds much promise as social ethicists engage the polycrisis ¹⁰² that is a feature of this time. This polycrisis is composed of a host of interrelated, transnational and global challenges (ecological, technological, socio-economic, and political) that, if not addressed, threaten to destroy our planetary home and bequeath to future generations a world of turbulence, conflict, and endemic inequality. However, notwithstanding the inflated rhetoric about the value of democracy, there is no way to restore faith in democracy without acknowledging and addressing the systemic failures of our current politics. The task of ethics is to interrogate the values that frame our politics, to illuminate how these shape our practice, and to consider what a renewed politics might look like. From the perspective of theological ethics, a renewed politics will need to address the systemic inequalities and the interrelated ecological breakdown that are the consequence of a tenacious political economy, much of it the outworking of the persistent legacy of empire. It will need to build a public realm grounded in shared intelligibility, and in that context distinguish between commitments that aim to build up and those that seek to tear down the democratic commons. It will need to create spaces for those many voices that remain silent and silenced. Ultimately, it will need to have the capacity to engender and propel a politics of human flourishing and planetary well-being.

An ethic that takes human vulnerability seriously, and not as something simply to be ignored or mastered, has the potential to shape a different kind of politics that can address these systemic failures. Currently the existential experience of vulnerability is deployed in the service of a politics that unites rather than divides. However the recognition of our shared vulnerability has the capacity to generate “a new kind of conversation: about how we act in the world; about our ethical obligations towards each other; about how to oppose the conditions under which some lives are more vulnerable than others; and about how to forge new alliances that are lived in ‘the horizon of a counter-imperialist egalitarianism.’” ¹⁰³ Keenan’s work is vital in seeding such conversations. Kristin Heyer’s recent work on moral agency, particularly her powerful 2024 Catholic Theological Society of America Presidential Address “Heart(s) of Flesh: Structural Sin and Social Salvation” ¹⁰⁴ also advances this possibility in important ways, as does the social ethics of William O’Neill ¹⁰⁵ and David Hollenbach. ¹⁰⁶ In its reflection, and in its social and political engagement, one hopes that theological ethics can propel a politics that is grounded in our shared vulnerability, that can cultivate an expansive sense of equal dignity, and that can ground our hope for a shared, equal and dignified future.