Professor mixes faith and academics

While searching for his life's vocation at age 17, politics professor Robert George asked his priest whether he had a calling to enter the ministry.

"You don't," he recalled his priest said. "You are more of the go forth and multiply kind of guy."

George addressed his search for a vocation and several other issues of faith last night in this year's first installment of the Religious Life Council's "What Matters to Me and Why" lecture series. A crowd of mostly students filled a room in Murray-Dodge Hall to capacity, overflowing into a connecting room to provide additional seating.

George, a lifelong Catholic, spoke extensively about faith, which he called a "centering" mechanism in his life. "Christian faith ups the ante of morality" in prioritizing one good human action from another, he said. "While faith is not the only path toward human good, it certainly makes finding the path easier."

Finding this path is not always straightforward because "morality is not about choosing between right and wrong," George said. "It is about eliminating morally illegitimate options [and] then choosing between several morally legitimate options."

He later added that "there are many mutually exclusive but upright ways of life."

George has found his path to fulfillment through his role as a scholar. "We have spirits, spiritual needs and spiritual desires," he said. "Intellect is one of God's gifts. It is the power to investigate a state of affairs, judge a state of affairs as worthwhile and act through freedom to bring ... this state of affairs into existence."

George has had plenty of opportunities to wield his intellect in pursuit of morality, specifically in the arena of public policy. George has served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and was a 2002 appointee to the President's Council on Bioethics.

As for finding his calling in political scholarship, George said that it was only after "God straightened me out on being an NBA player."

"At 17," he said, "I would have rated being a professor as number 187 out of 188 on a list of careers, only ahead of used car salesman."

But, George realized, "God has a plan, a calling, a vocation in mind for each of us. Finding one's vocation is about looking beyond personal desire to understand God's will."

George also mused on the plurality of moral options in analyzing one's life and finding a vocation. "There's prayer, which I don't [do] enough, and meditation, which I do even less."

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George's view on the centrality of faith in everyday life elicited mixed reactions from students. For Francisco Nava '09, "It's good to know we have believing, faithful scholars in the University."

Yet, Ranjit Chima '08 said, "I find his reduction of faith to believers and nonbelievers troubling. The lecture shed light onto his often-confusing stance on moral issues."