For I Have Sinned

M. Cathleen Kaveny is a scholar who focuses on the relationship of law, religion, and morality, serves as the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor at Boston College, a position that includes appointments in both the department of theology and the law school. She is the first faculty member to hold such a joint appointment. A member of the Massachusetts Bar, Kaveny clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked as an associate at the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray in its health law group. She was the 2018-2019 Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. Kaveny has published four books and over a hundred articles and essays, in journals and books specializing in law, ethics, and medical ethics. She serves on the masthead of Commonweal as a regular columnist. Her books include Law’s Virtues: Fostering Autonomy and Solidarity in American Society (Georgetown University Press, 2012); A Culture of Engagement: Law, Religion, and Morality (Georgetown University Press, 2016); Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square (Harvard University Press, 2016); and Ethics at the Edges of Law: Christian Moralists and American Legal Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018). Kaveny regularly teaches contract law to first-year law students. She also teaches a number of seminars which explore the relationship between theology, philosophy, and law, such as “Faith, Morality, and Law,” “Mercy and Justice,” and “Complicity.” Kaveny is the chair of the board of trustees of the Journal of Religious Ethics. She has been the president of the Society of Christian Ethics, the major professional society for scholars of Christian ethics and moral theology in North America. It meets annually in conjunction with the Society of Jewish Ethics and the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. Kaveny has served on a number of editorial boards including The American Journal of Jurisprudence, The Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of Law and Religion, and The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. She has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, Yale University, and Georgetown University, and a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago’s Martin Marty Center. From 1995 until 2013 she taught law and theology at the University of Notre Dame, where she was a John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law. 

James F. Keenan, S.J. is the Canisius Chair, Director of the Jesuit Institute, and Vice Provost of Global Engagement at Boston College. In 2003, he founded Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, (www.catholicethics.com) an international network. He received the John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America in 2019 and from 2020-2021 was president of the Society of Christian Ethics. He has written over 400 essays, edited 17 volumes, and published 13 of his own books including, University Ethics (2020) and recently A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (2022) and The Moral Life (2023).

James O'Toole is the University Historian and Clough Professor of History Emeritus. His new book, For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America, has just been published from Harvard University Press. He is also the author of The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (2008), Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (2004), and Ever to Excel: A History of Boston College (2021).

Leslie Woodcock Tentler is Emerita Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington, where she specialized in the history of American Catholicism. Her most recent book is American Catholics: A History, published in 2020 by Yale University Press. Her Catholics and Contraception: An American History was published by Cornell University Press in 2004; The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism Since 1950 in the United States, the Republic of Ireland, and Quebec, which she edited, came out in 2007.