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The Moral Life: Eight Lectures
James Keenan
Georgetown University Press, 2023, xiv + 177pp. £9.99 (pbk).
James Keenan S.J. is a giant among Roman Catholic ethicists for three reasons, and so any new book by him comes with enormous expectations, which are magnificently fulfilled in this short volume. Keenan is, first, the most prolific Roman Catholic ethicist in the United States, and quite possibly anywhere. He has written or edited several dozen books and, now in his early seventies, has managed to write over half a dozen articles a year for decades, reading and citing ethics, or moral theology, both from Christian and secular sources, in Italian, German and Spanish, as well as English. Some of these articles are popular, designed to be read by those who know no theology, while others are dauntingly academic. His original dissertation at the Gregorian University, in Rome, was on Aquinas’s distinction between what is good and what is right.
Secondly, Keenan has, with others, steered Boston College through the difficult thirty-five years of the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, during which Keenan was seen as a dangerous liberal (as a Vatican official told me personally over a decade ago). Boston College is now one of the pre-eminent centres of ethics in the Catholic world.
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