David Solomon / De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture
CV NEWS FEED // This past year boasts a slew of high-profile conversion stories—but the unsung conversion story of esteemed Notre Dame philosophy professor, David Solomon, teaches a powerful lesson about the link between faith and the pursuit of truth.
“Long is the line of distinguished philosophers who have converted to Catholicism,” Word On Fire Institute’s Honorary Professor for the Renewal of Catholic Intellectual Life, Dr Christopher Kaczor, wrote in a recent article: “Now we can add to their company David Solomon, who was received on May 23, 2024.”
Solomon arrived at Notre Dame in 1968, finding himself in vastly unfamiliar territory, Kacsor recalled, noting that Solomon was the third-ever non-Catholic to join the University’s philosophy department.
Kaczor notes that Solomon himself stated in his lecture, “Strangers in a Strange Land,” that he was “not only not a Catholic,” but “was as innocent of any real understanding of Catholicism as one could be.”
Solomon had been raised Southern Baptist, and further admitted in the lecture that his views of Catholicism “grew out of a combination of ignorance and prejudice in about equal measure.”
Of the intellectual Catholic guild at Notre Dame, Solomon stated: “ I wasn’t aware that such people existed.” Ultimately, Kaczor writes, Solomon’s conversion is due to the intellectual witness of these Catholics who became his friends:
His conversion is a culmination of a life of study, a consolation to his many friends, and an intensification of the union with his wonderful wife Lou, who entered the Catholic Communion on the same day.
Solomon is the founder of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture, and is renowned at the University for his courses on virtue ethics. As Kaczor writes, his example of “great kindness” to students whom he offered both professional and personal mentorship was deeply influential to him, and many others.
“And now Solomon has given us all yet another lesson by his powerful example,” Kaczor wrote: “to take the next step that God gives us,”
