Honorary Degree Recipient James Keenan S.J. to Present Lanigan Talk “HIV/AIDS, Global Public Health, and Catholic Ethics”

On Friday, Jan. 30, at 3:30 p.m. in room 100 of the science addition, James F. Keenan, S.J. a distinguished ethicist and theologian, will present the 2026 Lanigan Lecture. Father Keenan, who received an honorary degree from Le Moyne in 2025, has made profound scholarly contributions to the field of moral theology, particularly in the areas of social justice, human dignity and Catholic ethics. He has edited or written more than 25 books and published over 400 essays, articles and reviews worldwide. In 2003 he founded Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC), an international network of ethicists that has since hosted three international and six regional conferences. Today CTEWC has its own book series and is a live network of over 1,000 Catholic ethicists.

Among his books are University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics (2015 – Rowman and Littlefield) and A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (2022 – Paulist Press). In 2019 he received the John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America and he served as president of the Society of Christian Ethics from 2020 to 2021. A Jesuit priest since 1982, he received a licentiate and a doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Following the talk there will be a reception in Simon’s Pub. The Lanigan Lecture Series is funded by a gracious endowment from Julia and Thomas Lanigan for the advancement of medicine and the arts.