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    William Joseph Buckley completed his MA (Religious Studies) and PhD (Social Ethics) at the University of Chicago, where he was a University Fellow and Junior Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion (now the Martin Marty Center). Selected a Fulbright Fellow, he instead accepted a German Government and University Fellowship (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) to continue his dissertation's comparative research on reproductive bioethics and end of life decision-making in Europe and the United States. 

  Ongoing research into bioethics led to publications and teaching (Georgetown Schools of Medicine and Nursing; Johns Hopkins). An ecumenical fellowship commemorating slain seminarian civil rights worker Jonathan M. Daniels was received by Dr. Buckley during his early years in his hometown of St. Louis. This supported his original work as a volunteer, researcher, and then as an organizer of international teams of peace volunteers in Northern Ireland during its civil conflict--while, during these years, he was studying philosophy and theology at Cardinal Glennon College and Kenrick School of Theology in St. Louis. 

   Subsequent research into how local communities constructively mobilize resources for different kinds of justice, inspired Buckley's courses, curricular designed service learning, and publications such as his coedited collection still used in a nationally recognized liberal arts program. In addition, Buckley's research led to his internationally well-received volume on ethnic conflict and humanitarian intervention entitled Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions.  Reviewed in over twenty-eight international journals--this work continues to be used in published transnational academic, policy and popular research after over two decades in print. "Kosovo" features sixty-one essays by authors from seventeen nations translated from seven languages; it has been used in over sixteen colleges and universities across six nations.

    W.J. Buckley's work, Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Death and Dying--includes a separate Instructor's Resource Guide--and both were completed with nationally distinguished gerontological nurse practitioner and geriatric nursing specialist, Karen S. Feldt (PhD, RN). These works are especially timely for regional, national and international conversations about end of life decision-making. They received enthusiastic critical peer review, and are used in humanities, social sciences and applied training programs (clinical, legal and policy analyses, social work, psychology, pastoral care and ministry). 

    This work brings new clarity to a widely debated question: How can good dying be an object of a just society--and not merely fortune or privilege?  "Clashing Views" doesn't argue "Dying and Death" must somehow be finally "just". Rather-- using decades of outcomes based research and the most compelling philosophical and comparative religious arguments-- it demonstrates how particular experiences of dying and death have empirically better outcomes based on specific kinds of justice.  Cultural consensus maintains that human flourishing musters agreement as competently sustained in healthcare for being "just" when it reflects considerations of need, equal regard, merit, contribution, productivity, justice as fairness, free market competition, and promotes basic functioning or reduces inequities caused by dysfunctions (Powers, Faden, Nussbaum). Dying can be "better" or "well enough" when it reflects interpretations of justice in dying as equality (informed consent and decisional capacity in Chapter I), need (depression, I, compassion fatigue, IV, pain management , V), merit (futility, IX, brain death XIII), productivity-contribution (EOL costs, XV), justly sharing burdens of dysfunctions and justice as fairness (cultural competencies, XVII). 

    Buckley's research explores why some public debates about end of life decision-making, too often mistakenly paralyze personal decisions. On the one hand, "cognitive impairments" (subjective "cognitive decline") are terrifying owing to unfounded social constructions as "dying".  On the other hand, our age of end-stage dying and desisted treatment are likewise vexed by whether it is rational to cause (or resist) death events. Why? For all, reasonable practices for performing better dying are easily eclipsed using individual, even short-term practically chosen solutions as enabling hedges to perceived constraints of longer-term, bio-socially lived realities. Everyone dies, most face dying with foreseen end-stage illnesses. Many engage such experiences with understandable aversion to interference deploying justifiably protective if not remedial self-governance in advance directives. Some presuppose self-dignity requires micromanaging death events in advance. Sundry insist on a quest for absolute certainty between putatively opposing camps in these arguments with positions both sincere and sharp that appear intractable (“die by choice” vs. “die without intervention”). 

  Yet too many sidestep, neglect or marginalize ancient wisdom now retrievable from outcomes-based clinical practices where human and material resources are calibrated.   Dying well (enough) can be reasonably improved as common sense crafts to be taught and learned as practical "arts" enhancing classic friendship. Down-to-earth, sensible attention to improving well-known reservoirs of understanding and skill are possible about depression, advanced directives, effective pain management, feared burdensomeness, compassion fatigue and good hospice practices. Dying and death need not be constrained from which one's sole escape comes through onerously privatized ordeals of existentially dramatic, solitary decisions. (Post)industrial cultures too often problematize aging and dying by evoking individual responses of frightened self-mastery and control over scarce resource consumption, inviting fear and dread for  vulnerable dependence as burdensome for beloved.  Few seriously defend embodied self-sovereignty as exclusive, boundless and unending. Yet performative memories and anticipations can transform finitude and do loss differently. Dying and death can be better experiences. Retrieved cultural imaginaries (poetics) can enable dying well (enough) by sustaining living and dying with shared biosocial meanings. Generously accompanied performances can function as social and symbolic capital, nourished by memories and anticipations of beloved and communities. Disciplines, professions and historic traditions reflect (“[post-]critically”) and continue to debate the relative (un)trustworthiness of  diverse theories as support (or "backings") for practices. Theoretical arguments pursue, for example, precisely which understandings are presupposed for diverse practical/applied issues. Such theories include which kind of justice is at stake;  which rationality or reasonableness is advanced by which epidemiological shifts, cancer, heat disease, COPD, pain, palliation, depression, patient directives, hospice versus hospital, cultural practices of accompaniment, asymmetric power relations, etc. Yet for dying and caregivers, as practical crafts, good care is more learning how to build a simple, comfortable chair or habitus/instrument allowing a person to express herself and listen to whose experience, memory and anticipation, than how to design the architecturally and theoretically perfect, aerodynamically fastest aircraft.

    Recent publications include collaborative analysis of "Ethics of Palliative Sedation and Medical Disasters"  following unfolding events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that provoked wider public discussions about sedation at the end of life. He organized, chaired a select panel and edited the published international work exploring consensus to advance public debate among Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Common law traditions regarding "who decides and how" in palliative sedations. 

    W.J. Buckley uses gender and justice to examine a century of re-inventions of embodied intimacy. He publishes in specialized as well as multi-language and interdisciplinary formats. These writings demonstrate how ethical practices appeal to audiences convictions (called "rhetorics") as embodied performances that use figurative devices as literary tropes called social imaginaries (interpreted as post-structuralist "poetics"). For example,  cross-cultural performances of betrayal music  disclose global postmodern "knowledge economies" of sexual optimism poised to revise generations of patriarchal "sexual pessimism" with gender equity.  

   Globalization is increasingly gendered through political repression and economic oppression. His bilingually translated essay "Alone in a Fair: Has a Chilean Poet Civilized Consumerism with Justice?" probes the work of exiled Chilean poet Alicia Galaz (1927-2003). Her activism and writing mobilized transnational audiences by enlarging an entire generation's loves (elegies) and heroes (epics) from one period's surplus of hatreds and excess of villains.  He has also explored papal understandings of ritual, education and justice, Love Grows Through Love; Exploring a Shared Catholic-Lutheran History (Benedict XVI's "Deus Caritas Est'). Ongoing research includes the politics of terrorism. 

    Dr. Buckley has also enjoyed a number of distinguished visiting teaching appointments in the humanities, social sciences and the professions (medical,  public service, private sector,  transnational organizations, NGOS, ministry). His reviews and articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion; Theological Studies; Modern Theology; Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics; Ethics and Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics; The Linacre Quarterly: Catholic Medical Association; Journal of Lutheran Ethics, Religious Studies Review; Revista Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas  (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain); Revista Cultura y Religión (Universidad Arturo Prat, Chile); Filozofski Godisnjak (Belgrade University).  He has presented papers and refereed scholarship for The Society of Christian Ethics, The American Academy of Religion, Catholic Theological Society of America, College Theology Society, The Association for the Study of Nationalities (Columbia); Center for Clinical Bioethics (Georgetown), among others. 

Dr. Buckley served twice by official appointment from 2014-2020 as one of two lay members of the Judicial Ethics Committee of the Maryland Courts. Dr. Buckley has also served as a consultant to the United Nations Independent International Commission on Kosovo, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, as a member of hospital ethics committees and as a board member of a nationally recognized local domestic abuse shelter.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Dr. Buckley teaches and writes on a range of issues in comparative ethics including; biotechnology and global health, private and public initiatives in geriatric care and genomic innovations; medical futility, end of life care, contending cultural constructions of sexuality;  ethnic conflict and the politics of terrorism. 

SAMPLE PROFESSIONAL RESEARÇH PRESENTATIONS:

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[02/26/2015] How Ebola Helped Sociology Rescue the Humanity of Global Health for Eastern Sociological Society,  “Crossing Borders,” Paper Session: Public Health: Contagious Illness and Epidemics. New York City February 26, 2015 &  How Ebola Helped STEM Rescue Global Health, Maryland Collegiate STEM Conference, Montgomery College, Germantown, MD (November 1, 2014)

·       [01/08/2015] "Accompanying Dying: Comparing Contemporary Ecumenical Voices (ELCA, EKD, DBK, LC-MS, CPCE, USCCB)" for Christian Reflections on Dying Well in a Technological Society, Lutheran Ethicists Gathering 2015 Thursday January 8, 2015, Palmer House Hotel, Chicago, Illinois