Kathleen Shields

Biographic Data

ID6562450
NAMEKathleen Shields
GIVEN NAMESKathleen
FAMILY NAMEShields
SIGNATURESHIELDS K
AFFILIATIONSNational University of Ireland, Maynooth
ORCID0000-0002-2677-4253
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS137
TOTAL CITATIONS26
AUTHOR COUNT1
EDITOR COUNT136
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2004
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX1

  • The Moral Vision of Pope Francis

    Suzanne Mulligan, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

  • Be Transformed

    William I Orbih, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

  • Embodied Integral Ecology

    Madeleine LaForge, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

    Ten years after Laudato si’, people still observe climate crises and, simultaneously, widespread apathy. How can educators foster ecological conversion that motivates care for creation? Pope Francis views environmental degradation as a breakdown of relationships. Care for creation, therefore, requires major shifts in culture, spiritual practice, and cultivation of ecological virtues. Praxis pedagogy helps students embody integral ecology. Beyond …

  • Human Dignity and Liberal Politics

    Sjoerd Mulder, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

  • Catholic Higher Education and Catholic Social Thought

    Christopher P Vogt, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

  • The Catholic Case Against War

    Tobias Winright, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

  • ‘God Is in the World’

    Michele Dillon, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

    This paper explores the tension confronted by the Catholic Church as it seeks to maintain relevance amid accelerating secularism. The author introduces the concept of postsecularity, and the opportunity and challenge it presents for the Church as it navigates the current moment and its own institutional identity and public relevance. Focusing on Francis’s papacy, the author highlights the pope’s appreciation of everyday secular realities and how,…

  • The Death Penalty as Precedent for Punitive War and Punitive Mutilation

    Julia Fleming, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

    For centuries, capital punishment served as a precedent within Catholic social thought for the justification of other sanctions, including punitive war and punitive mutilation. If the state could execute criminals, surely it had the right to impose other penalties that were not necessarily lethal? Ironically, support for these two punishments waned, either explicitly or implicitly, within Catholic social teaching well before the recent developmen…

  • Faithful Citizenship and the US Catholic Bishops

    Daniel Gustafson, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

    In examining the US Catholic bishops’ election statements since 1976, the author argues that the bishops are promoting an increasingly ecclesial, as opposed to personalist, view of conscience. Whereas their presentation of conscience formation once encouraged individuals to form their own consciences to make decisions well, the bishops have come to assume for themselves the responsibility for forming the laity’s consciences. An update is overdue,…

  • Concordance and Challenges of Catholic Social Teaching Regarding the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

    José María Larrú, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

    The World Council of Churches and the permanent observer of the Holy See to the UN were significantly active during the negotiations prior to the adoption of Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This paper uses the five speeches of the popes at the UN to analyze the coincidences and differences of the Catholic model of development with the one derived from the 2030 Agenda. The Catholic model is synthesized in eight…

  • Modern Catholic Family Teaching

    Marcus Mescher, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

  • Christian Social Ethics and Land Reform in Africa

    Emmanuel Omokugbo Ojeifo, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

    The theme of land has largely been neglected in Christian social ethics in Africa. Although a growing body of theological literature exists on Africa’s ecological challenges, the topic of land as a unique category for understanding Africa’s social history and current developmental predicament has not received significant attention. This article examines the ongoing crisis of land in Africa, with a focus on the problem of land dispossession and di…

  • Climate Change and the Common Good

    Michele Dillon, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2025

    Amid increased global concern about climate change and intensified political polarization, the Catholic Church is well positioned to bring public attention to environmental ecology and the common good. Public Catholicism finds renewed opportunity with post-secularity and the expanded space it creates for moderate religious actors to articulate ethical grounds for collective actions toward remedying societal problems. Focusing primarily on Laudato…

  • Organizing and the Revitalization of American Catholicism

    Richard L Wood, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    American Catholicism today struggles to sustain its longtime character as a truly “public religion”—that is, a religious tradition with a vital presence within the public sphere in the US. Reinvigorating Catholicism in the US will require both internal renewal and new approaches to public life, both of which will require continuity with the deep tradition and significant reorientation of ecclesial dynamics. This paper argues that specific, faith-…

  • Civil Rights and Prophetic Indictment

    Dennis J Wieboldt, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    In 1967, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Pedro Arrupe, sent a memorandum on the American “racial crisis” to the Jesuit priests, brothers, and social institutions of the United States. Through appeals to the American legal and Catholic moral traditions, On the Interracial Apostolate articulated why Jesuits should strive to achieve racial equality, initiating a historic period of expansion in Jesuit civil rights programs. Given schola…

  • Principle in Practice

    Nicholas Hayes-Mota, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    This article draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential theory of practice and employs it as a framework to analyze community organizing, focusing on the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky. As a practice in MacIntyre’s sense, it argues, community organizing constitutes a teleological form of social activity that is oriented toward distinctive kinds of “internal goods” and that functions to develop new capacities within its practitioners to recog…

  • Looking Up and Looking Out

    Jonathan Tran, Matthew Philipp Whelan et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    This essay reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Óscar Romero’s third pastoral letter, The Church and Popular Political Organizations, as offering a liberation-driven and Gospel-minded account of coalitional solidarity. After tracing Du Bois’s analysis of the “public and psychological wage” of racial capitalism and its divide-and-conquer strategy, the authors turn to how democracy for Du Bois involves a double maneuver of looking up f…

  • Integral Human Development

    Marc V Rugani, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

  • Can Unions, Accountability, and Synodality Coexist? An Ecclesiological Analysis of the 2015 San Francisco Archdiocesan Teachers’ Union Dispute

    Ish Ruiz, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    What place does organizing have in the Church’s synodal journey? In his address for the opening of the Synod on Synodality in 2021, Pope Francis described synodality as “unity, communion, the fraternity born of the realization that all of us are embraced by the one love of God.” Yet the process of collective bargaining is often fraught with division, contention, and adverse interactions based on competing interests. The author argues that, in add…

  • Left Behind

    James B Gould, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    This paper uses themes from Catholic social teaching to challenge Church and society to prioritize a group that is left behind by social injustice: people with intellectual disabilities. It provides background information on intellectual disability, summarizes moral principles of Catholic social doctrine, describes sociological facts about how people with intellectual disabilities are left behind by social factors, and prescribes actionable solut…

  • Does Catholic Health Care Have a Responsibility to Those Harmed by Pollution

    Sara Kolmes, Sara K Kolmes et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    Pollution results from humankind’s failure to be good stewards of creation. Guided by Catholic environmental bioethics, Catholic health care organizations have reduced their contribution to this pollution, but they also encounter its human cost. Catholic hospitals treat countless patients sickened by pollution, which most strongly impacts the poor and disenfranchised—those whom the Church expresses a preferential responsibility to care for, in pa…

  • Counting the Cost

    Caroline Redick, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

  • “Protagonists of Transformation”

    Emily Jendzejec, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    Discerning Deacons is using community organizing strategies to listen to and empower the People of God, shift power, and work toward structural change within the Church. Its goal is encouraging the discernment of opening the permanent diaconate to women, with fidelity to the synodal process. Reflecting on the vision and strategies of Discerning Deacons offers unique insights into organizing within an ecclesial structure. Its work highlights conve…

  • A Proclamation of Hope

    Erin Brigham, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024

    This paper explores the theological underpinnings of Pope Francis’s messages to world meetings of popular movements as a way to discern his theology of organizing. In these messages, one encounters Francis’s social teaching, which is rooted in the preferential option for the poor and marginalized. Beyond an epistemological privilege of the poor long embraced in liberation theology, Francis looks to the agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of t…

  • Enacting Catholic Social Tradition

    Jens Mueller, Cheryl Handel et al.ARTICLEJournal of Catholic Social Thought2024