Maureen H. O’Connell is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics in the Department of Religion and Theology at La Salle University. She holds a BA in History from Saint Joseph’s University and a PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College. She authored Compassion: Loving Our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization (Orbis Books, 2009) and If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (The Liturgical Press, 2012), which won the College Theology Book of the Year Award in 2012 and the Catholic Press Association’s first place for books in theology in 2012. Her next book, Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness, is due out in November 2021 with Beacon Press and explores the interplay of her Catholic and racial identities across her family’s history in the City of Philadelphia.  

Maureen received the Distinguished Lasallian Educator award in 2017 from both La Salle University and from the District of North Eastern North America, one of the provinces of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. She is a member of the national Lasallian Education Council, where she chairs a national ad hoc committee on advocacy. She is a member of POWER (Philadelphians Organizing to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild), an interfaith coalition of more than fifty congregations committed to making Philadelphia the city of “just love” through community organizing. She serves the Board for the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies; Cranaleith Spiritual Center; and Rosemont College, where she was a member of the President’s Commission on the Legacy of Slavery.