Dr. Peter Kreeft — “Support a Catholic Speaker Month”

I MUST ADMIT that I find it hard not to plagiarize Dr. Peter Kreeft. But I don't feel so bad, because Dr. Kreeft said (in one of his audio lectures) that he has a difficult time not plagiarizing C. S. Lewis.

Fallible Blogma has a project called Support a Catholic Speaker Month, which hopes to introduce to a larger audience the 100 most popular Catholic speakers in the English language. I chose to feature Dr. Kreeft, whose writings and audio are a great influence on me.

Dr. Kreeft is professor of philosophy at Boston College and King's College in New York City. He is a prolific author with more than 50 published books, including notably the Handbook of Catholic Apologetics. Kreeft is also a frequent lecturer: he has six speaking engagements in the month of November alone.

Kreeft traces his philosophical tradition from the ancient Greek Socrates, through Aquinas, to contemporary realist philosophers. Kreeft makes the distinction between the ancient and modern philosophical views like this: a realist philosopher looks at a tree and thinks about the tree itself, while the modern philosopher thinks about himself looking at the tree. Kreeft therefore is a genial critic of such contemporary madness as moral relativism and postmodernism. Kreeft is a master of the Socratic method, and many of his books feature a fictional Socrates in a similar vein, such as Socrates Meets Kant.

Kreeft is a Catholic, who converted from Calvinism; his conversion, like mine, was partially based on the vast intellectual and artistic patrimony of the Faith. He remains a committed ecumenist; he notes that the moral codes of the major world religions are remarkably similar, and so a broad ecumenical movement can combat our current culture of death.

I've enjoyed his audio recordings very much over the past few years: you can listen to some here.