Preface

Abstract

Preface David Paul Deavel, Interim Editor What are the greatest intellectual needs to which Catholic scholars should be attending today? One person with a very distinctive perspective on this question is the remarkable Jesuit philosopher and theologian Fr. Robert Spitzer, who visited the University of St. Thomas this past spring to give a public lecture on how the discoveries of modern science support belief in God based on his book New Proofs for the Existence of God.1 Fr. Spitzer is a kind of one-man Catholic university. With interests in philosophy of science, Christology, Ignatian spirituality, virtue theory, business ethics, management, leadership, and education theory (among many others), he has published ten books and dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters, produced eleven television series for the Catholic television network EWTN, and appeared on secular television programs numerous times, including Larry King Live to discuss science and the notion of a Creator with Stephen Hawking’s co-author Leonard Mlodinow and Deepak Chopra.2 Fr. Spitzer’s productivity tempts the envious academic to think that “Spitzer” is really a collective of Catholic scholars all publishing on different subjects under the same name. He is indeed a real (and singular) man. I met him through my [End Page 5] wife, Cathy, a philosophy professor here at St. Thomas. She had been his student and teaching assistant as an undergraduate at Seattle University in the mid-nineties. She introduced me when he came to speak at Fordham University during graduate school. A dynamic speaker—especially for an academic—who, because of vision difficulties, memorizes his speeches, he tends to pour forth knowledge and wisdom in torrents of speech both exhilarating and overwhelming. My wife said taking a course from him was the equivalent of trying to drink from an open fire hydrant. While officiating our nuptial Mass, his homily had that open-hydrant feel. A cousin of mine, poet and agnostic, told me later that she was moved by his exhortation to love divine and human; never had she heard Frederick Nietzsche and Edith Stein invoked in a sermon, and certainly not in a wedding sermon. Fr. Spitzer is not just a talker, but a mover and shaker. He served for ten years as the president of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, and has founded numerous organizations in which Catholics and people of good will can collaborate, gain resources, and be strengthened in the attempt to advance both faith and reason in the academy and the public square, including two pro-life groups and two organizations dedicated to helping create healthy business and non-profit workplace cultures. After retiring from Gonzaga, Fr. Spitzer began the Magis Center for Faith and Reason, which produces educational material to teach people about how faith and science are partners and not enemies. He is able to reach a broad audience with this material through his EWTN show “Father Spitzer’s Universe.” This joint experience of teaching and building educational institutions of various kinds is why Fr. Spitzer was asked on his trip to St. Thomas to address a smaller group of faculty and administrators on issues of curriculum and Catholic identity at a lunch the day following his lecture. At this talk, at which he encouraged faculty and administrators alike to think about the philosophy and theology that should be at the heart of every Catholic university’s core [End Page 6] curriculum, Fr. Spitzer was asked what he thought were the main challenges that needed to be addressed for today’s students. His answer was that there were two crying needs: 1) for more general apologetics for the existence of God and the identity of Christ, and 2) more work on the complementary relation between science and religion. As it so happens, sitting around the table were two St. Thomas faculty members who have recently contributed books in precisely these areas. Philosopher Michael Rota’s Taking Pascal’s Wager is a three-part work that enunciates an updated form of Pascal’s famous argument that making a commitment to God even when one is not completely sure God exists is a fully rational action because there is much to gain and little to...