Michael Novak
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Michael Novak (born September 9, 1933) is a Roman Catholic American philosopher and diplomat. He writes on capitalism, religion, and the politics of democratization.
He served as U.S. chief ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1981 and also as the ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Novak is currently George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Novak is a frequent contributor to magazines and journals including First Things and National Review. He is a member of the Catholic Advisory Board for the Ave Maria Mutual Funds. Novak is also a board member of the Capital Research Center and the Center of the American Experiment.
Novak was born in 1933 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He earned an M.A. in history and philosophy of religion from Harvard University and a Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus (a degree in theology), from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In 1994 he was awarded the Templeton Prize, the so-called “Nobel Prize for religion”.
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[edit] The Tiber Was Silver
"Thus, in early January 1960, after twelve years in religious life, having had a profound experience of religious and intellectual community, I found myself in a garret apartment in New York City working on the manuscript of a novel. I had one hundred dollars that my father had given me, plus a determination not to go to work at any job except writing. I was budgeted at $35 a week (rent took $10), and so I had three weeks to find the next check. Luckily, an assignment for a book review or an article kept arriving each month. The manuscript I was working on was not my first novel, but in June of 1960 Doubleday accepted this one for publication. The advance seemed to me a fortune. I believe it was $600, with a matching check when I would hand in the completed manuscript." (From Novak, "Controversial Engagements"[1] )
[edit] Harvard Years
Michael Novak attended Harvard University to study philosophy and religion, hoping to obtain a doctorate in philosophy of religion. However, the analytical school held hegemonic sway over the philosophy department and he, as a religious believer, felt like a large chunk of philosophy was left untouched by his professors. He never received his doctorate, though he did start teaching at Stanford before he completely quit the doctoral track.
[edit] The Second Vatican Council
Novak worked as a correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter during the second session of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, where he also got the opportunity to fulfill a book contract for a fellow reporter who was not able to complete the project. The result was Novak's second book, The Open Church, a journalistic account of the events of the second session of the Council, from a marked theological angle.
[edit] Stanford years
Novak's friendship with the Presbyterian theologian Robert McAfee Brown during the Second Vatican Council led to a teaching post at Stanford University, where he became the first Roman Catholic to teach in the Humanities program. Novak taught at Stanford University from 1965 to 1968, during the key years of student revolt throughout California. These were prolific years for Novak, and saw the publication of his most politically radical and theologically ambitious work, mostly in the form of essays collected into longer books. Among these, A Time to Build (1967) offers a comprehensive, if piecemeal, vision for a revolutionary new approach to the problems of belief and unbelief, ecumenism, sexuality, and war. In A Theology for Radical Politics (1969), Novak mounts a theological defense of the New Left student movement, which in hindsight appears to be more conservative than radical, given that Novak argued that the renewal of the human spirit is more important than the revolutionary reconstruction of social institutions: "The revolution," Novak writes, "is in the human spirit, or not at all." Politics: Realism and Imagination contains more journalistic pieces on visiting American Vietnam War deserters in France ("Desertion"), the birth and development of the student movement at Stanford ("Green Shoots of Counter-Culture") and other more philosophical essays on nihilism and Marxism.
[edit] SUNY Old Westbury
Novak left Stanford for a post as dean of a new "experimental" school at the freshly-built State University of New York at Old Westbury, Long Island. This was an uncertain, chaotic, yet fruitful time in Novak's career.
Among the works he published during these years, the longer philosophical essay The Experience of Nothingness (1971) stands out as a denser and more cautious examination of alienation and rootlessness in modern society, and was an attempt to caution the New Left about the dangers of utopianism -- an attempt which, Novak would later argue, failed (see his "Errands to the Wilderness," in On Cultivating Liberty). The book remains one of Novak's greatest accomplishments, though it is largely forgotten. Novak's experiences in California and in the Second Vatican Council served to create his novel, Naked I Leave (1970), which covers the journeys of a former seminarian-turned-reporter.
[edit] Syracuse University and the American Enterprise Institute
[edit] Quotes
"The family is the human race's natural defense against utopianism."
--The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
What, then, is the place of God in our colleges? The basic human experiences that remind man that he is not a machine, and not merely a temporary cog in a technological civilization, are not fostered within the university. God is as irrelevent in the universities as in business organizations; but so are love, death, personal destiny. Religion can thrive only in a personal universe; religious faith, hope, and love are personal responses to a personal God. But how can the immense question of a personal God even be posed and made relevant when the fundamental questions about the meaning and limits of personal experience are evaded?
"God is dead... What are these churches if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" Nietzsche asked. But much of Western humanism is dead too. Men do not wander under the silent stars, listen to the wind, learn to know themselves, question, "Where am I going? Why am I here?" They leave aside the mysteries of contingency and transitoriness, for the certainties of research, production, consumption. So that it is nearly possible to say: "Man is dead... What are these buildings, these tunnels, these roads, if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of man?" God, if there is a God, is not dead.
He will come back to the colleges, when man comes back.
--"God in the Colleges," A New Generation: American and Catholic (1964)
"...You are eternal, but you postpone remembering. Your heart cries out for life, but you stifle it for fear. Why are the men in our age so afraid to be? Why does it spread even to the monasteries? Why such hesitance? Why such timidity?" The priest's almond-black eyes were flashing. He spoke with long-accumulated earnestness. "It is everywhere! In everyone who comes to talk with me."
"I am not afraid, padre, but I don't see what I should do," Richard said after a silence.
"I can't tell you, Riccardo. You must see for yourself."
--The Tiber Was Silver (1961)
To choose against the culture is not merely to disobey; it is to "die." Against what the culture knows is real, true, and good, one has chosen the evil, the false, and the unreal. To be or not to be, that is the question. To choose against the culture is to experience nothingness.
--The Experience of Nothingness (1970)
Now when we Christians speak of the Trinity, the inner being of our God, we know not whereof we speak. The point we seize upon, however, is that our God has spoken of himself in such a way that we are to imagine him—not as one in eternal solitude, as Plato, Aristotle, and many of the ancients imagined him, but rather as more like a community of love and friendship than like any other phenomenon of our experience. No one has seen God. Strictly, no one knows what he is like. Yet he himself points our minds in these directions: He is to be thought of as a Communion of Divine Persons—radiating his presence throughout creation, calling unworthy human beings to be his friends, and infusing into them his love so that they might love with it. Caritas is our participation in a way of loving not our own. It is our participation—partial, fitful, hesitant, imperfect—in his own loving.
--From “The Love That Moves the Sun,” in A Free Society Reader
[edit] See also
[edit] Partial Bibliography
- Washington's God (with Jana Novak) (2006).
- Universal Hunger for Liberty:: Why the Clash of Civilizations is Not Inevitable (2004).
- On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (2001).
- Business as a Calling (1996).
- The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993). ISBN 0-02-923235-X.
- Free Persons and the Common Good (1988).
- The New Consensus on Family and Welfare: A Community of Self-Reliance (Novak et al.) (1987).
- The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982). ISBN 0-8191-7823-3.
- Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972).
- The Experience of Nothingness (1971).
- Naked I Leave a novel (1970).
- Belief and Unbelief (1965).
- The Tiber was Silver a novel (1962).
