NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
For more than 70 years, Mortimer J. Adler’s writing served as a gateway to the Catholic Church, helping both Protestants and secularists find their way home. Yet Adler himself refused to join the Church until it was almost too late.
Born in 1902 to a secular Jewish family, Adler had little interest in God or religion until, as a student at Columbia University, he discovered the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Enamored with the Angelic Doctor’s clear, precise thinking, Adler soon became part of the early 20th century’s neo-Thomistic revival.
In 1930, Adler’s work in Thomistic philosophy secured him a professorship at the University of Chicago School of Law. There, he embarked upon the project that would define his professional life: making classic works of philosophy and literature accessible to the common man.
Along with the school’s president, Robert Hutchins, Adler launched the Great Books of the Western World series through Encyclopedia Britannica. He also served on the Board of Editors for Encyclopedia Britannica, eventually becoming its chairman, and published his own series of popular books on philosophy, religion, education, and more.
As early as the 1940s, that work led people to assume that Adler had left his secular Judaism behind and entered the Catholic Church. But in life, as opposed to work, Adler struggled to embrace the Church’s moral teachings. He verged on the edge of conversion for years, but he still wavered as late as July 16, 1980, the date he published his apologia on God’s existence, How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan.
When Adler finally did embrace Christianity, it was as an Episcopalian, the faith of his second wife, Caroline. Only after her death in 1998 did Adler complete the journey that began nearly 80 years before, entering the Catholic Church at the age of 97. He died less than two years later.
