Frank Beckwith And His Time At Fordham

Beckwith in ten years, could become the leader of the American Counter Reformation. He is just getting his sealegs, when you read the full article, you will realize his arguments for the Catholic Church is just well grounded Holy Spirit inspired reasoning and makes Catholic Christian apologetics look easy. This is a portion of a much longer interview.

In the mid-1980s, when I attended Fordham University for my PhD in philosophy, I lived with my Italian grandmother, Frances Guido, a devout Catholic who was delighted that I was attending Fordham. Although she knew that I was Protestant, she seemed confident that some of my professor-priests would help steer me back to the Church. I left Fordham in 1987 and finished my dissertation in Nevada in November 1988. My experience at Fordham was terrific. I took memorable classes from some great philosophers. I took "Thomas Aquinas" and "Metaphysics" with Fr. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., "Medieval Humanism" with Fr. Gerald McCool, S.J., and "Plato," "Nietzsche," and "Hegel" with Fr. Quentin Lauer, S.J. In McCool's class we read Augustine's Confessions and in Clarke's Aquinas class we covered important sections of the Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles. Although it would be wrong to say that my experience at Fordham led me back to the Church, it is fair to say that because I studied under some of the finest philosophical minds American Catholicism had to offer, I acquired a deeper appreciation of the philosophical underpinnings of Catholic theology and its relationship to the histories of philosophy and Christian thought. This understanding helped form and shape my views on God's nature, the human person, and the natural moral law. But none of these views were inconsistent with Protestant theology, as the works of some Thomistic and Thomas-friendly Evangelical philosophers, such as Norman L. Geisler, Paul Copan, and J. P. Moreland, clearly show.

Read the full and thoughtful interview at The Catholic World Report (here)