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"Most foundational texts on theological ethics address the person or the society; the point of departure determines, inevitably, fairly different trajectories. By starting with the experience of grief, this book posits the human as ineluctably social: grief is an epiphany that reveals how the human is inseparable from the collective. Indeed, grief inevitably summons us to grieve socially. Nothing discloses the human more rawly than grief that "it is not good for the human to be alone." Keenan then develops an ethics of vulnerability, following Judith Butler, understanding it not primarily as a compromised state of being but rather as that which establishes the human as capacious for recognizing and responding to others. Mutual recognition, a theme that can be found from Georg Hegel and Sigmund Freud to Axel Honneth, Nancy Frasier and Jessica Benjamin, emerges as the first moral act of the vulnerable human. In light of vulnerability and recognition, Keenan shows how we can now understand conscience as guiding the activity of one who has first vulnerably recognized others. The second half of the book works out a Christian ethics of vulnerability, starting with discipleship, then grace and sin, then the virtues, and finally the communion of saints, the works of mercy, and the beatitudes"--
About the author
James F. Keenan, SJ, Canisius Professor of Theology, director of the Jesuit Institute, and vice provost of global engagement at Boston College. He founded Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, an international network of ethicists. He also received the John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America and is the past president of the Society of Christian Ethics. He has published a number of books, including
A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (2022), and is the founding editor of Georgetown University Press's Moral Traditions Series.
