Making Sense of Eighty Years of Theological Ethics

Abstract

This article surveys all the contributions in ethics on these pages over the past eighty years and is divided into four historical parts: the first three years; the years from 1943 to 1964; the years Richard McCormick wrote from 1964 to 1984; and the years beyond McCormick. It surveys a period from neo-Scholastic manualism at the eve of World War II to the contemporary era, where methods for attaining moral objectivity are complex. This survey notes shifts in theological method, the movement of the center from the personal to the social, the transition from an exclusively clerical authorship to a much broader array of authors, and a shift in readership from priest confessors to professional theologians.

Reflecting and Advancing the Transformation: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Journal of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023

“…We have already noted the transformative impact that such deliberations have had on understandings of the moral subject, of moral reason, and of conscience above and highlighted how the JRE has reflected and sometimes amplified these concerns. Keenan describes this transition as “a shift to the social” occasioned by the inclusion of new theological voices who construe the foundations of moral theology in irrevocably social rather than personal terms (2019, 160) and who attend to the multiple ways in which these foundations are shaped by the dynamics of power.…”