Following his education at Banff Academy and his service in the RAF(1953–1955), Fergus Kerr entered the Dominican (the Order of Preachers) in 1956. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1962. Kerr studied in Aberdeen, Paris, Munich, and Oxford. He was a student of Donald M MacKinnon, John Holloway, and Cornelius Ernst OP. From 1966 to 1986 he taught philosophy and theology at the University of Oxford.
In service to the English Dominican Province, Kerr was Prior at Blackfriars Oxford from 1969 to 1978. From 1992 to 1998 he served as Prior at Blackfriars, Edinburgh. In 1998, he returned to Blackfriars, Oxford, where he served as Regent of Studies from 1988 until 2004. He returned again to Edinburgh in 2004 where he remained for the rest of his life. Fergus served as the inaugural Director of the Aquinas Institute, Blackfriars, Oxford and was the editor of New Blackfriars, the bimonthly journal of the English Dominicans (1995–2020) and then review editor.
At the time of his death, Fergus was affiliated with Blackfriars, Edinburgh. He held an honorary fellowship in the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh and had a role in the university’s Catholic chaplaincy team. He was also an Honorary Professor of St Andrews University, a distinction he held since 2005. Fergus belonged to the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain, of which he was president from 1992 to 1994.
Among the books written by Fergus are: Theology After Wittgenstein, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, and Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity. A collection of Fergus’ essays was published in 2023, From Aberdeen to Oxford. The latter contains a wonderful autobiographical essay, written in Fergus’ inimitable style: conversational ease, insight, clarity and precision, drawing upon an exceptional breadth of reading and formidable databanks of memories expressed with gentleness and charity.
Fergus received many honours include being elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an Honorary Doctor of Divinity from the University of Edinburgh at a special ceremony in 2019, during which Prof. David Fergusson in his speech pointed out that the History of Scottish Theology describes Fergus as “the most distinguished Scottish Catholic theologian of the 20th Century”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCjH3eo1ixw&t=84s
On a personal note, it is said that Fergus was a lovely person to live with in community. He was devoted to the Dominican life and was a wonderful preacher. He was a wise and compassionate man with a warm sense of humour though he was also a quiet man.
To finish, a quote from Fergus from his autobiographical essay in From Aberdeen to Oxford (p. xxviii):
‘Reflecting on things, my memories are of course of people. But people cannot be separated from the places you got to know them – and they you – Woodchester, Hawkesyard, Blackfriars, Oxford…What I should note at the start is the impact, the day-by-day, routine impact on you, that you are never aware of, and I imagine most of the time the places and the people we see every day have, if you like, an impact that is so pervasive, so casual, so unconscious, that it would be too difficult to locate, let alone narrate.’
From Aberdeen to Oxford, was published by ATF Press in 2023 the first volume in the Dominican Scholars Collection. The papers in this volume, cover a period of Fergus Kerr’s writing from 1961 to 2018 and covers a wide range of philosophical and theological issues, literary figures, philosophers and theologians. The list includes: DH Lawrence, M-D Chenu, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, John Henry Newman, René Descartes, Augustine, GEM Anscombe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, David Hume, John Webster, Yves Congar, Vatican I, the Virgin Birth, and Radical Orthodoxy.