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Profile
Ralph McInerny is one of the world’s outstanding Thomistic
philosophers. He holds degrees from the St. Paul Seminary,
the University of Minnesota and Laval University. He taught
at the University of Notre Dame from 1955 until this past
year, and in 1977 he was named the Michael P. Grace Professor
of Medieval Studies. For seven years he was director of the
Medieval Institute; from 1979 to 2005 he was director of the
Jacques Maritain Center.
Professor McInerny has published extensively both academically
and in the field of fiction. In the first category are
Aquinas and Analogy, The Question of Christian Ethics, Aquinas
on Human Action and the Penguin Classic, Thomas Aquinas:
Selected Writing. His biography of Jacques Maritain, The
Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain appeared in 2003, and a
self-biography in 2006 with the title I Alone Have Escaped to
Tell You: My Life and Pastimes. Most recently, he has
published Praeambula fidei: Thomism and the God of the
Philosophers (CUA Press, 2006).
Ralph is also the author of the Father Dowling, Andrew Bloom,
and Sister Mary Teresa mysteries, among the most recent of
which include Green Thumb (2004), Irish Gilt
(2005), and The Letter Killeth: A Mystery Set at the
University of Notre Dame (2006).
He has served as president of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association, the Metaphysical Society, the
American Maritain Society and the Fellowship of Catholic
Scholars. He has been visiting professor at nearly a dozen
universities and is the recipient of various fellowships, honors
and awards, among them the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement award
for mystery writing. He is a fellow of the Pontifical Academy
of St. Thomas Aquinas. His Gifford Lectures, delivered in
Glasgow in 1999-2000, were published under the title
Characters in Search of Their Author (2001). He was
appointed to membership on President Bush’s Committee on the
Arts and Humanities. In 2007 the Ave Maria University Aquinas
Center for Theological Renewal presented him with the Cardinal
Journet Medal.
Ralph McInerny and his wife Connie, who passed away in 2001,
enjoyed 48 years of married life, and the McInerny clan counts
six children and seventeen grandchildren. |
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