Faculty & Staff Directory

Hille Haker, PhD

About

Hille Haker, Richard A. McCormick, S.J., Chair of Moral Theology

Hille Haker, Ph.D., holds the Richard McCormick S.J. Endowed Chair of Catholic Moral Theology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on the foundations of ethics, moral identity, literary & narrative ethics, Christian ethics as critical social ethics, bioethics, and feminist ethics.

Prior to joining the faculty at Loyola, Dr. Haker was Chair of Moral Theology and Social Ethics in the Catholic Theology Department of Frankfurt University (2005 to 2009), Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Harvard Divinity School (2003 to 2005), and Heisenberg Research Scholar (2002–2003). She holds a Ph.D (1998) and Habilitation (2002) in Christian Theological Ethics from the University of Tübingen, Germany.

From 2015-2018, Hille Haker served as the President of Societas Ethica, European Society for Research in Ethics. She served on the editorial board of the International Journal Concilium for many years and in this role co-edited nine journal issues.
While working in Germany, she was a member of several Bioethics Committees, including the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies to the European Commission from 2005-2015, the German Ethics Committee of the Federal Physicians Chamber, and the Bioethics Committee of the German Bishops Conference.

Her most recent work is Towards A Critical Political Ethics. Catholic Ethics and Social Challenges. Prof. Haker is currently working on a book on two basic concepts of ethics,  Recognition and Responsibility.

Prof. Haker's publications include: Moralische Identität. Literarische Lebensgeschichten als Medium ethischer Reflexion (1999), Ethik der genetischen Frühdiagnostik (2002), and  Hauptsache gesund (2011); eight co-edited books, among them - The Ethics of Genetics in Human Procreation (2000), Ethik-Geschlecht-Wissenschaften (2006), Medical Ethics in Health Care Chaplaincy (2009), and Religiöser Pluralismus in der Klinikseelsorge (2014); multiple articles; and nine co-edited journal issues for Concilium, among them - Human Trafficking (2011), Postcolonial Theology (2012), The Return of Apocalypticism (2014), and Theology, Anthropology, and Neurosciences (2015).

Program Areas

Ethics, Theology

Research Interests

My monographs focus on the concept of the moral self: experiences and ruptures of identity and non-fictional and fictional life-stories.

I have worked on a social ethics approach to medical ethics & bioethics, concentrating on reproductive medicine and genetic diagnosis.

Recently, I have introduced a social-political-ethical approach that combines the Frankfurt School critical theory (especially Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Honneth) with the German political theologies of Metz, with feminist ethics and liberation theology. I aim to pursue a decolonial ethics from the perspective of the "North."

I aim for a critical-constructive ethics of "recognition & responsibility" that builds upon critical theory in combination with a hermeneutic ethics of storytelling and literature, seen through the lens of what I call "vulnerable agency."

I collaborate with other interdisciplinary scholars on contextual studies in social and political ethics, bioethics, and feminist ethics. These include human rights and justice in the context of refuge and migration, reparations and restorative justice, reproductive rights, genetic diagnoses and hereditary gene editing, artificial intelligence and social robots.

Currently, I am pursuing an interdisciplinary project on "Entangled Responsibility" that inquires into clergy sexual violence and the institutional responses of a university as well as the responsibility for the past, in part through oral history and a narrative ethics approach. 

www.entangledresponsibility.com

Awards

Grants:

2022-2023 Transformative Research Grant LUC: Entangled Responsibility

2021-2022 Grant from Fordham University; Grant from the Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage: Documentation of Clergy Sexual Abuse Cases connected to Loyola University Chicago

2015-2016 Faculty Fellowship, Center for the Human Rights of Children, Loyola University Chicago, “Vulnerabilities and Human Rights Violations of Children Migrating to the US Alone: An Analytical Framework for Catholic Ethics and Advocacy.”

Awards:

2015-2018: President of Societas Ethica, European Society for Research in Ethics

2002 Heisenberg Scholarship, German Science Foundation (DFG)

1998 Dissertation Price of the Catholic Theology Faculty (1998)

Non-Academic Award:
2007 "Pride of the Exchange" Award for the Youth Exchange between Cloppenburg and Limerick, Ireland

Selected Publications

BOOK PROJECTS
Recognition and Responsibility: Critical Theory and Christian Ethics (in preparation)
Vulnerability and Ethics (in preparation)
Storytelling, Ethics, and the Question of Remembrance (planned)

RECENT MONOGRAPH:
Towards A Critical Political Ethics: Catholic Ethics and Social Challenges. Studien zur Theologischen Ethik 156, Berlin (Schwabe) 2020.

EDITOR OF BOOK SERIES:
Values in Bioethics (Brill), since 2017
Medizinische Ethik in der Klinikseelsorge/Medical Ethics in Health Care Chaplaincy, Lit Verlag (4 volumes).

RECENT EDITED BOOK:
Unaccompanied Minors and the Ethics of Child Migration: Social, legal, and ethical perspectives (co-edited with Molly Greening), Lexington, Lanham 2019.

ACADEMIC ARTICLES 2019-2022 (selection)
"Experience, Identity and Moral Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" in Artificial Intelligence and Human Enhancement, ed. by Hertha Nagl-Docekal and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Berlin, De Gruyter, 51-76.

"Uprooted: Towards a Medical Ethics of Suffering" in Christof Mandry (Hg.): Suffering in Theology and Medical Ethics. Paderborn, Brill/Schöningh, 2022, 113-144.

"Recognition and Responsibility" in Religions. Special Issue “The Provinces of Moral Theology and Religious Ethics,” edited by Dafydd Mills Daniel 12,7 (2021), 467, 1-18. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/7/467

"Die USA am Scheidepunkt? Eine politisch-ethische Intervention" in Krise und Transformation. Scheidewege 1-2021, hg. v. Jean-Pierre Wils, 91-112.

"Geschlechtsangleichende Behandlungen bei transgender Jugendlichen – Ethische Fragen" in Herder Korrespondenz, 9/2021, 36-40.

"Verletzliche Freiheit. Zu einem neuen Prinzip der Bioethik" in Hildegund Keul (ed.), Theologische Vulnerabilitätsforschung – gesellschaftsrelevant und interdisziplinär, Stuttgart (Kohlhammer), 2021, 99-118.

"Decolonizing Religion(s): A New Catholic Direction for the Global Ethic" in Multi-Religious Perspectives on a Global Ethic: In Search of a Common Morality, Myriam Renaud, William Schweiker (eds), Routledge, New York, 2020, 165-184.

"From Political Theology to Critical political ethics" in Politics, Theology, and the Meaning of Power, M. Becka, Bernarderth Caero Bustillos, João Vila-Chã (eds.), Concilium 3/2020, in five languages, English version p. 63-73.

"Towards a Decolonial Narrative Ethics, Reprinted" in Ethics and Literary Practice,Adam Zachary Newton (ed.), Basel 2020: MDPI, 2020, 72-102. (https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/2424)

"Human Dignity and Gendered Violence" in Value and Vulnerability: An Interfaith Dialogue on Human Dignity, Jonathan Rothschildt and Matthew Petrusek (eds.), Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame Press), 2020, 411-457.

Andorno, Roberto, Baylis, Francoise et al. (Haker, Hille): "Geneva Statement on Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Need for Course Correction" in Trends in Biotechnology, Volume 38, ISSUE 4, April 01, 2020, P351-354.

"Habermas and the Question of Bioethics" in European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11/4, 2019, 61-86.

“Political Theologies in a Post-Christian World.” in T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, New York: T&T Clark (2019), 547-564.

"Political Ethics and the Rights of Unaccompanied Migrant Children" in Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Social, Legal, and Ethical Perspectives, Hille Haker/Molly Greening (eds.), Lanham: Lexington 2019, 201-225.

"Homeland Theology? Decolonizing Christianity and the Task of Public Theology" in Taking it to the Streets. Public Theologies of Activism and Resistance, Jennifer Baldwin (ed.), Lanham: Lexington, 2019, 163-178.

"Feminist Ethics" in Encyclopedia of Sociology, Second Edition, edited by George Ritzer & Chris Rojek (2019). (online resource, 4 pages entry).

“Resonanz. Eine Analyse aus ethischer Perspektive.” in Resonanz: Im interdisziplinären Gespräch mit Hartmut Rosa, Nomos: 2019, 33-43.