I have long admired the moral passion and commitment of the Jesuit James Keenan of Boston College, and particularly valued his enlightened theological responses in the early days of AIDS. His work was outstanding. This new book is dedicated to other Roman Catholic theologians whose books I have also long admired: Lisa Sowle Cahill and the Jesuit David Hollenbach, both of the author’s colleagues at Boston College, and to the influential Roman Catholic theologians now in their ninth decade, the American Charles Curran and the Scotsman Jack Mahoney.
The moral life does not disappoint. Based on lectures given at Campion Hall, Oxford, it is engaging, accessible and comprehensive. It can be read with profit by Christians of all stripes. It begins with a very sensitive examination of grief, which touches us all sooner or later. He admits that he was deeply affected by the sudden death of his brother at the age of 26 and then of his best friend and Jesuit brother Lúcás Chan at the age of 46.
The final chapter is devoted to Chan’s writings on the Beatitudes, which he helpfully identifies with various stages of the moral life, beginning with “Blessed are those who mourn.” He points to the grieving disciples in the Upper Room in Acts, and to Jesus’s mourning for his friend Lazarus in John’s Gospel, and then to Mary Magdalene’s mourning for Jesus at his tomb. Mourning, Keenan emphasizes, “is a form of love” that can reveal both human vulnerability and the interconnectedness between people.
The chapter on human connection—rendered here as “recognition” and sometimes as ubuntu—is insightful. It uses infant studies that show how babies respond early on to other babies’ faces and argues that adults forget this when they woefully fail to treat other people—African slaves in the past and George Floyd today—as fellow human beings.
In contrast, “Humble vulnerability helps us recognize our interrelatedness, which encourages us to recognize one another, seeing ourselves as connected, interdependent, and responsive in the further realization of human dignity. … Humility gives us stability.”
More conventional chapters follow on conscience, discipleship, grace/sin, and the virtues. Nevertheless, he presents a fascinating mix of insights from secular philosophers such as Judith Butler, Reformed theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Stanley Hauerwas, and other Catholics.
The only book that surprisingly remains unmentioned is Alasdair Macintyre’s little masterpiece from 1999. Dependent, rational animals: Why humans need virtueswith the keen observation that we all begin our lives as dependent beings and many of us end them in a similar way. Rationality blooms only in some and mainly in midlife.
Whatever else one might add, it is a very good book.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent and editor of theology.
The Moral Life: Eight Lectures
James F. Keenan SJ
Georgetown University Press £20
(978-1-64712-400-7)
Church Times Bookshop £18
