I HAVE long admired the moral passion and commitment of the Boston College Jesuit James Keenan, treasuring particularly his enlightened theological responses in the early days of AIDS. His work shone. 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 colleagues of the author at Boston College, and the formative RC theologians, now in their ninth decade, the American Charles Curran and the Scottish Jack Mahoney.
The Moral Life does not disappoint. Based on lectures given at Campion Hall, in Oxford, it is engaged, accessible, and inclusive. It can be read with profit by Christians of many different hues. Opening with a highly sensitive exploration of grief, which, sooner or later, touches us all, he admits to having been deeply affected by the sudden death of his brother at the age of 26 and then of his best friend and fellow Jesuit Lúcás Chan at the age of 46.
The final chapter turns to Chan’s writings on the Beatitudes, which he identifies helpfully with different stages of the moral life, starting early with “Blessed are they who mourn.” He points to the disciples grieving in the Upper Room in Acts, and, in John, to Jesus’s grief for his friend Lazarus, and then to Mary Magdalene’s grief for Jesus at his tomb. Grief, Keenan insists, “is a form of love” that can evoke a recognition of both human vulnerability and interconnectedness.
The chapter on human interconnectedness — depicted here as “recognition” and sometimes as ubuntu — is luminous. It makes good use of infant studies that demonstrate how babies respond early to the faces of other babies and, argues that adults forget this when, lamentably, they fail to treat other people — African slaves in the past and George Floyd today — as fellow human beings.
In contrast: “A humble vulnerability helps us to see our interrelatedness, that incites us to mutual recognition, where we see ourselves constituted as connected, interdependent, and responsive in the further realization of human dignity. . . Humility keeps us grounded.”
More conventional chapters follow on conscience, discipleship, grace/sin, and the virtues. Nevertheless, in them he deploys a fascinating medley of insights from secular philosophers such as Judith Butler, reformed theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Stanley Hauerwas, as well as fellow RCs.
The only book surprisingly unmentioned is Alasdair Macintyre’s 1999 little masterpiece Dependent, Rational Animals: Why human beings need the virtues, with its sharp observation that we all start life as dependent beings and many of us end life in a similar way. Rationality flourishes, only for some and mainly in the middle of life.
Whatever else might have been added to it, this 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