Dr. Jaycox received his Ph.D. in theological ethics from Boston College in 2014. In his dissertation, he proposed a virtue-based ethic of social anger, considering this emotion as a form of moral agency that motivates groups to pursue prophetic political resistance and institutional reform in response to systemic injustice.
Operating within the Catholic moral tradition, his scholarship is generally concerned with the question of how critical perspectives on class, race, gender, and sexuality might offer a basis for reconstructing the natural law methodologies that characterize this tradition. More specifically, he investigates the extent to which the “preferential option for the poor” can offer an accurate and powerful moral lens helpful for addressing justice issues in bioethics, violations of human rights, inequitable institutional participation, and other traditional concerns of Catholic social ethics.
He is published in the journals Developing World Bioethics and Horizons, and he has authored reviews for Political Theology and the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. He is an active member of the Society of Christian Ethics, the Catholic Theological Society of America, and the College Theology Society. Currently, he teaches undergraduate courses in Christian theology and ethics at SU, and he is preparing a book proposal for his research on anger and social justice.