Catherine Duggan

Research Interests

Cait Duggan is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Theology. Her current research draws upon scholarship in Christian ethics, political philosophy, and sociology of law to present how civil law can cultivate the civic virtues necessary for harmony in contemporary democratic societies.

The political thought of Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon figures in Cait's research. Even as democracy was not Aquinas’s paradigmatic form of government, Maritain and Simon show that the scholastic thinker articulates principles that can undergird a democratic order. Together, they cleared the way for contemporary religious ethicists to retrieve Aquinas for the purpose of theorizing democratic virtues, such as piety and gratitude.

More broadly, Cait's areas of research include Thomistic moral, political, and legal thought, Augustinian moral and political thought, twentieth century political and liberation theologies, the theology of history, and bioethics.