Living moral life requires recognition, vulnerability: Keenan Lecturer

Now in its 35^th year, the annual Keenan Lecture was held on Thursday, Oct. 24 at St. Thomas More College (STM).

The lecture is the signature academic event at STM and was established to commemorate the life of Dr. Michael Keenan, the first dean of the College, who served from 1975-1985. It features leading intellectuals and leaders in various fields.

The 2024 lecture featured a distinguished theologian with the same surname, although unrelated.

Rev. James F. Keenan, S.J., is a moral theologian, and bioethicist, is a prodigious writer and editor and the Canisius Chair, Director of the Jesuit Institute and Vice Provost of Global Engagement at Boston College.

He has been a Jesuit priest since 1982 and received a licentiate and a doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

In 2023 Georgetown University Press published The Moral Life, His D’Arcy Memorial Lectures given at the University of Oxford in 2022.  

In his lecture, titled Unfolding the Moral Life, Rev. Keenan said he has been doing work on vulnerability and recognition through discussions about grief.

“I’m really interested in this question: We teach people what they should know, but whether they are going to do anything is another issue.”

He said unless people are vulnerable – meaning being open to another to the point of being capable of being wounded – they won’t know how to respond to others.

“How do Catholic institutions really promote vulnerability and what I would call the skill of recognizing what needs to be done?”

Rev. Keenan said recognition is the first true act of vulnerable people.

He pointed to the protests that began in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020 the day after a black man named George Floyd was killed while being arrested by police. A few days later, on June 6, an estimated 500,000 people joined protests in 550 places across the United States.

“The people in the march were recognizing that black lives matter and that George Floyd mattered and horrendously that … thousands of others who have been killed or murdered matter, though often they are overlooked.”

He said the marchers were grieving the profound racial inequity that marks the U.S., and in their grief, they revealed their vulnerability and demanded that we recognize the legitimacy of their lament and the lack of our recognition.

“In the past four years there has been much grief and much vulnerability and it’s about time, then, that we heed the Spirit and begin the process of recognition,” he said. “Indeed, if we cannot see the Spirit calling us to recognition in the marches of Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd that black lives matter, then we are never going to understand the Spirit who led the disciples.”

The full lecture is available online at:
2024 Keenan Lecture

For look at the full biography of Rev. James F. Keenan, S.J., please visit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_F._Keenan