¹ Francis, Laudato Si’ (hearafter LS in notes) (May 24, 2015), §155, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

² LS, §156; cf. Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), §26, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. “Ecology of Daily Life” is the phrase he uses to title the section on human ecology, beginning at §147.

³ LS, §158. As Francis further notes, “This option entails recognizing the implications of the universal destination of the world’s goods, but, as I mentioned in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, it demands before all else an appreciation of the immense dignity of the poor in the light of our deepest convictions as believers. We need only look around us to see that, today, this option is in fact an ethical imperative essential for effectively attaining the common good.” In this way, respect for human dignity entails recognition of our created nature.

⁴ LS, §§152–53.

⁵ LS, §150.

⁶ LS, §155. On the relationship between human and environmental ecology, see especially Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (June 29, 2009), §§48–51, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html, §§48–51.

⁷ LS, §158, §162, §157.

⁸ LS, §138. See especially the discussion on climate change and migration at §§25–26. Although Francis calls for a global mindset and care for “our common home,” he criticizes the “throwaway” culture that presently characterizes this mindset. See especially the first chapters of both Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti in which “what is thrown away are not only food and dispensable objects, but often human beings themselves,” discarded based on age, race, and gender. Francis, Fratelli Tutti (October 3, 2020), §§18–24, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html.

⁹ LS, §139.

¹⁰ For an extended discussion of Francis’s presentation of integral ecology as more closely aligning human ecology and natural ecology by comparison to his predecessors, see Lucas Briola, “The Integral Ecology of Laudato Si’,” in The Eucharistic Vision of Laudato Si’: Praise, Conversion, and Integral Ecology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022), 63–104.

¹¹ LS, §138. On the different senses of “common good,” see David Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–9.

¹² LS, §2.

¹³ See also the discussion on “new forms of cultural colonization” in the global economy that “impose a single cultural model” in Fratelli Tutti, §§12–14. On the difficulty of navigating “common good” in a pluralist context, see Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, 17–22.

¹⁴ More particularly, applying a liberationist framework to the concept, Castillo elucidates Francis’s presentation of integral ecology as “a paradigm shift away from the politics, economics, and cultural formations that now structure the global system.” In Daniel P. Castillo, An Ecological Theology of Liberation: Salvation and Political Ecology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019), 52–62, at 53.

¹⁵ In the treatment of M. Shawn Copeland in this article, I rely especially on an earlier essay, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” in Catholic Social Thought and the New World Order: Building on One Hundred Years, ed. Oliver F. Williams and John W. Houck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), and how a praxis emphasis on common good, as evidenced in this earlier essay, grounds her emphasis on solidaristic praxis in her Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2023).

¹⁶ Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 310.

¹⁷ I rely especially on Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

¹⁸ Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?,” in Varieties of Secularism in A Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 145–65.

¹⁹ David Hollenbach, “Gaudium et spes,” in Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, 2nd ed., ed. Kenneth R. Himes, et al. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018), 287.

²⁰ Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, 17–31.

²¹ Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, 21.

²² Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, 21.

²³ Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, 212.

²⁴ Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, 216–17. The political dimensions of the question of borders in an expanded common good is beyond the scope of this article. The focus of this article is on the epistemic and imaginative potential of the notion of the common good to extend from the human to nonhuman reality via the concept of integral ecology, while at the same time attending to bias in the human community.

²⁵ Willis Jenkins, The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 131.

²⁶ Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, 131.

²⁷ Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, 131.

²⁸ LS, §§106–14. The technocratic paradigm is discussed in the second part of this article.

²⁹ I am drawing especially on her earlier essay, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good.” Here, Copeland draws on the US Bishops’ letters, Brothers and Sisters to Us (1979) and This Land Is Home to Me (1975) to challenge the status quo of the social order: “These letters offer critiques of racism and exploitation which extend and advance the meanings, values, and practices of our idea and realization of the common good” (321).

³⁰ Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 81.

³¹ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 83.

³² Lonergan, Method in Theology, 85.

³³ For Copeland’s reliance on political and liberation theologies that “have challenged the anthropological displacement of human being with bourgeois European white male being,” see Enfleshing Freedom, 78–81, at 78. The “task” or “praxis” of solidarity then follows a hermeneutic of suspicion and of recovery, grounded in “the solidaristic life praxis of Jesus of Nazareth” (82). For further discussion of Copeland’s account of solidarity and “the theological priority of poor women of color,” see Jeremy W. Blackwood, “The Heart of the Mystical Body of Christ: Subjectivity and Solidarity with Poor Women of Color,” Theological Studies 77, no. 3 (2016): 652–77, at 654–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/0040563916653088, and Andrew Prevot, Theology and Race: Black and Womanist Traditions in the United States (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2018), 62–64.

³⁴ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 53; Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 321.

³⁵ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 31–32. See also Gordon Rixon, “Dwelling on the Way: Pope Francis and Bernard Lonergan on Discernment,” in Irish Theological Quarterly 84 no. 3 (2019): 312–13.

³⁶ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 32.

³⁷ Rixon, “Dwelling on the Way,” 313.

³⁸ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 104.

³⁹ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 104, 240.

⁴⁰ Bernard Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” in Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 15, ed. Frederick G. Lawrence, Patrick H. Byrne, and Charles C. Hefling Jr. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 103.

⁴¹ Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” 103.

⁴² Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” 103, 105; Lonergan, Method in Theology, 117.

⁴³ Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” 105.

⁴⁴ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 117–18.

⁴⁵ Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 321; emphasis in original. On culture as “a living, dynamic and participatory present reality,” see LS, §143.

⁴⁶ Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 321.

⁴⁷ Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 321.

⁴⁸ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 7, quoting Lonergan, “Metaphysics as Horizon,” in Collection, 2nd ed., Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 198.

⁴⁹ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 7.

⁵⁰ Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” 103.

⁵¹ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 85.

⁵² See Lonergan, Method in Theology, 116–17.

⁵³ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 7.

⁵⁴ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 8.

⁵⁵ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 8.

⁵⁶ Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 310. See also Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” 102–03.

⁵⁷ Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 245-247.

⁵⁸ Lonergan, Insight, 247.

⁵⁹ Lonergan, Insight, 247, 249.

⁶⁰ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 8; emphasis in the original.

⁶¹ On how racism operates as a culture wherein racial bias can be conscious or unconscious, see Bryan M. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 13–33.

⁶² Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 8.

⁶³ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 82, 87–88. On the importance of authenticity and avoiding superficiality in openness to “others,” see M. Shawn Copeland, “Disturbing Aesthetics of Race,” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 3, no. 1 (2006): 26. To this end, Copeland posits the habitual and virtuous “hard work” of authentic commitment to engaging other cultures that “risks” conversion: “For resisting racism should bring about change in us: change in our attentiveness, in our questions, in our reflection, in our judgments, in our decisions, in our choices, in our living, in our loving” (27).

⁶⁴ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 82.

⁶⁵ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 112.

⁶⁶ Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” 103–05.

⁶⁷ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 77–78.

⁶⁸ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 16–17. As Prevot describes, Copeland’s use of stories reveal “not only disturbing truths about the [ongoing] violence against black female bodies and all sorts of variously marginalized bodies … These stories also display black women’s agency.” Prevot, Theology and Race, 61.

⁶⁹ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 15, 28–31.

⁷⁰ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 76, 78.

⁷¹ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 76, 82.

⁷² Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 76, 54.

⁷³ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 54, 79. As Roberto S. Goizueta describes: “This turn to a new subject takes seriously the intrinsic corporality of Christ’s identification with the victims of history.” In Roberto S. Goizueta, “‘A Body of Broken Bones:’ Shawn Copeland and the New Anthropological Subject,” in Enfleshing Theology: Embodiment, Discipleship, and Politics in the Work of M. Shawn Copeland, ed. Michele Saracino and Robert J. Rivera (Lanham, MD: Fortress Press, 2018), 5.

⁷⁴ Taylor, A Secular Age, 549.

⁷⁵ Taylor, A Secular Age, 302–03; 428–29.

⁷⁶ Taylor, A Secular Age, 614–15, 554. As Saba Mahmood describes: “The buffered self—the secular self par excellence, in Taylor’s account—is a distinctly Christian achievement.” Hence, she presses Taylor to more explicit acknowledgment of “the relations of power that provided the structural conditions for the emergence of this peculiar self-conception” “so as not to rehearse” these assumptions, which Mahmood detects in Taylor’s narrative via the language of “us” and “them,” and the “consistent movement (or slippage?) … from the particularity of Christianity to its universal transcendence.” In Saba Mahmood, “Can Secularism be Other-wise?,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 282–99, at 284, 291–92.

⁷⁷ Taylor, A Secular Age, 554, 742.

⁷⁸ Rather than arguing for the necessity of the outcome, Taylor describes his method as “a zig-zag account, one full of unintended consequences.” Taylor, A Secular Age, 95. On the challenges of identifying the “we” and “our” of Taylor’s account, see José Casanova, “A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight?,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 265–81, at 270–79.

⁷⁹ Taylor, A Secular Age, 286.

⁸⁰ Taylor, A Secular Age, 285; emphasis added.

⁸¹ Taylor, A Secular Age, 285–86.

⁸² Taylor, A Secular Age, 555, 615, 742.

⁸³ Taylor, A Secular Age, 286.

⁸⁴ Taylor, A Secular Age, 286.

⁸⁵ Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?,” 145–65, at 151; emphasis added.

⁸⁶ Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 320, quoting This Land Is Home to Me, §483, §485; emphasis added.

⁸⁷ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 16.

⁸⁸ LS, §§66–67 (in chap. 2, “The Gospel of Creation”); §§156–57 (in chap. 4, “Integral Ecology”).

⁸⁹ LS, §140: “Each organism, as a creature of God, is good and admirable in itself; the same is true of the harmonious ensemble of organisms existing in a defined space and functioning as a system” (emphasis added). See also §69: “Together with our obligation to use the earth’s goods responsibly, we are called to recognize that other living beings have a value of their own in God’s eyes: ‘by their mere existence they bless him and give him glory.’” The encyclical thus upholds “our unique dignity and our gift of intelligence,” alongside “‘the particular goodness of every creature’” (§69). The emphasis in Laudato Si’ on organisms is a theological claim about the goodness of creation. Although this reflects an older paradigm in ecology, namely, where “the organisms are the system,” the encyclical also operates with a broader ecosystems view. For an overview of this paradigm shift in ecology, see Steward T. A. Pickett, “The Flux of Nature: Changing Worldviews and Inclusive Concepts,” in Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and Action, ed. Ricardo Rozzi, et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Publishing, 2013), 265–79, at 268.

⁹⁰ LS, §141.

⁹¹ LS, §139.

⁹² LS, §139; emphasis added.

⁹³ LS, §143, §146.

⁹⁴ LS, §147, §150.

⁹⁵ LS, §145, §154.

⁹⁶ LS, §156, §157.

⁹⁷ LS, § 49, §159.

⁹⁸ LS, §240. On the exitus-reditus dynamic of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (hereafter cited as ST) invoked here, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, trans. Robert Royal (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 2003), 83–90.

⁹⁹ For how the return of all creation to God invokes a universal common good, see Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 109, a. 3: “Now it is manifest that the good of the part is on account of the good of the whole. Hence each particular thing, by its natural appetite or love, loves its own proper good on account of the common good of the whole universe, which is God. Hence Dionysius says … that ‘God converts all things to love of Himself.’”

¹⁰⁰ See Aquinas’s presentation of the natural inclinations at ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2, where he begins with what is common to all creation, proceeds to what is common between humans and other animals, and finally to what is unique to the human species. On how all created species are differentiated and related according to natural appetite, see also ST I-II, q. 26, a. 1; and Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 105–10.

¹⁰¹ LS, §139; emphasis added. It is important to note that the study of “natural systems themselves” cannot assume independence from human effects; see Pickett, “The Flux of Nature,” 268, 271.

¹⁰² LS, §90. The concept of the common good remains anthropocentric insofar as it reflects the unique dignity and role of the human person: “At times we see an obsession with denying any preeminence to the human person; more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure” (§90). Hence, the broadening horizon of concern toward “a universal communion” emerges from the human heart that understands the coinherence of human and ecological good: “A sense of deep communion with the rest of nature cannot be real if our hearts lack tenderness, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings” (§91).

¹⁰³ LS, §92.

¹⁰⁴ LS, §86, quoting ST I, q. 47, a. 1. Francis appeals here to the analogical imagination of Aquinas, which takes Scripture as its base (see ST I, q. 1, a. 9) and relies on the role of divine wisdom in ordering the universe (see ST I q. 103, a. 8).

¹⁰⁵ LS, §240. Following the analogical approach, this grasp is necessarily limited “for it is clearer to us what is not of God, than what is.” ST I, q. 1, a. 9, ad. 3. See also Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 40–45.

¹⁰⁶ LS, §66.

¹⁰⁷ LS, §66.

¹⁰⁸ Francis, Querida Amazonia (February 2, 2020), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20200202_querida-amazonia.html, §48, quoting John Paul II, Address to an International Convention on “The Environment and Health” (March 24, 1997), §2.

¹⁰⁹ Castillo, An Ecological Theology of Liberation, 56; emphasis in the original. Following Castillo, a liberative approach to integral ecology grounds the concept in “an underlying unity between history and nature” (35), especially apparent in Francis’s reading of Cain and Abel where “sin distorts not only the human/divine and human/neighbor relationships, but also the human/earth relationship.… Here, sin is not simply a historical-social phenomenon. Rather, it is a politico-ecological phenomenon, one that disorders the human person’s proper threefold relationship of communion” (56).

¹¹⁰ LS, §69. This also resists a distorted understanding of human “dominion” over the earth; see §§66–67. On how a “qualified anthropocentrism … is required for hearing and responding to the cries of the earth and poor,” see Castillo, An Ecological Theology of Liberation, 9–12, at 12. On the different senses of human in Laudato Si’ in relation to the nonhuman environment, see Cajetan Iheka, “Pope Francis’ Integral Ecology and Environmentalism for the Poor,” Environmental Ethics 39 (Fall 2017): 249–56, https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics201739319.

¹¹¹ Pickett, “The Flux of Nature,” 271–72.

¹¹² For further discussion on flux, ecology, and approaches to ethics, see Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, 151–58; Castillo, An Ecological Theology of Liberation 15–17, esp. at 16n49; Christopher Hamlin and David M. Lodge, “Beyond Lynn White: Religion, the Contexts of Ecology, and the Flux of Nature,” in Religion and the New Ecology: Environmental Responsibility in a World in Flux (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 6–10.

¹¹³ LS, §162.

¹¹⁴ See also Francis, Querida Amazonia, §42, quoting Documento con aportes al Sínodo de la Diócesis de San José del Guaviare y de la Arquidiócesis de Villavicencio y Granada (Colombia); cf. Instrumentum Laboris, 17: “The harm done to nature affects those [Indigenous] peoples in a very direct and verifiable way, since, in their words, ‘we are water, air, earth and life of the environment created by God. For this reason, we demand an end to the mistreatment and destruction of mother Earth. The land has blood, and it is bleeding; the multinationals have cut the veins of our mother Earth.’”

¹¹⁵ LS, §67; emphasis added.

¹¹⁶ LS, §58.

¹¹⁷ LS, §140.

¹¹⁸ See also Iheka’s discussion on environmental racism in “Pope Francis’ Integral Ecology and Environmentalism for the Poor,” 250–53.

¹¹⁹ LS, §2; see also §49 on the “numbing of conscience” that emerges from a “lack of physical contact and encounter” with the poor.

¹²⁰ LS, §143.

¹²¹ LS, §143.

¹²² LS, §144. For Francis’s particular concern for Indigenous peoples, see §§145–46.

¹²³ LS, §106. See also §§109–10. This is also evident in Francis’s invocation of the image of the polyhedron as reflective of the common good; see Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (November 24, 2013), §§234–236, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html.

¹²⁴ LS, §§143–46.

¹²⁵ LS, §233. In a footnote to this line, Francis cites the Muslim poet ali al-Khawas who reflects on the interconnection between the experience of God and creatures: “Prejudice should not have us criticize those who seek ecstasy in music or poetry. There is a subtle mystery in each of the movements and sounds of this world. The initiate will capture what is being said when the wind blows, the trees sway, water flows, flies buzz, doors creak, birds sing, or in the sound of strings or flutes, the sighs of the sick, the groans of the afflicted….” Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, ed. Anthologie du soufisme (Paris, 1978), 200.

¹²⁶ LS, §§1–2, drawing on Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Creatures; emphasis added.

¹²⁷ Copeland, “Reconsidering the Idea of the Common Good,” 321.

¹²⁸ The final version of this article benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions offered by participants following the presentation of an early draft at the Society of Christian Ethics Annual Meeting in Chicago in January 2023, and from colleagues at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University who generously read and provided constructive feedback on a later draft at our faculty colloquium in February 2024. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editors at Horizons for constructive feedback and suggestions made during the review process.