Associate Professor
Theology Department (Theological Ethics)
Kate Ward is a theological ethicist working in areas including economic ethics, virtue ethics, fundamental moral theology and Catholic social thought. She is the author of Wealth, Virtue and Moral Luck: Christian Ethics in an Age of Inequality (Georgetown, 2021) and coedited Bothering to Love: James F. Keenan's Renewal and Retrieval of Catholic Ethics (Orbis, 2024) with Christopher P. Vogt. Her articles appear in journals including Theological Studies, Journal of Religious Ethics, Heythrop Journal, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Studies in Christian Ethics, and American Journal of Economics and Sociology. She serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Moral Theology, Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Asian Horizons and on the planning committee for Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church. In the 2025-26 academic year she is on leave from 探花视频, conducting as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame.
Education
Dr. Ward graduated from Harvard College, where she studied psychology, in 2005, and earned her M.Div with concentration in Bible from Catholic Theological Union in 2011 and her Ph.D. in theological ethics from Boston College in 2016. Before beginning her Ph.D. studies, she worked at AFSCME Council 31, a labor union organizing workers in Catholic health care settings.
Courses Taught
- Foundations in Theology
- Theology and Economics
- Many Faces of US Catholicism
- The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice