Francis Russell Hittinger

Research Professor of Law and William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa; member of two pontifical academies.

Professional Background

From 1996-2019, Dr. Hittinger was the incumbent of the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he was also a Research Professor in the School of Law. Since May 2019 he is the Emeritus Professor of Religion.

In 2019, he became the Senior Fellow at the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he is a Visiting Scholar in the John U. Neff Committee on Social Thought, and Visiting Professor in the Law School at the University of Chicago.

From 2020 through 2022 he was a Visiting Professor here at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. He has served here as Dean of the College of Fellows since 2014.

In January 2020 he gave the Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford. And, he received the Aquinas Medal from the American Catholic Philosophical Association in November 2023 which is their most prestigious award.

Since 2001, he is a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, to which he was elected a full member (ordinarius) in 2004, and appointed to the consilium or governing board from 2006-2018. On Sept. 8, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Professor Hittinger as an ordinarius in the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, in which he finished his ten-year term in 2019.

In 2005, he was named an Alonzo MacDonald Senior Fellow for Christian Jurisprudence in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law. He remains an Affiliated Scholar.

He has taught at Fordham University and at the Catholic University of America, and has taught as a Visiting Professor at Princeton University, New York University, Providence College, and Charles University in Prague. During the academic term 2014-15, he was a Visiting Ordinary Professor in the School of Business and Economics at the Catholic University of America.

On 25 May 2013, he was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris Causa) by The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA. He gave the 81st annual commencement address.

In 2003, to mark the centenary of the death of Pope Leo XIII, Professor Hittinger gave a lecture to the Ministry of Culture of the Italian Government. In 2004 he gave a talk titled “Secularity and the Anthropological Problem,” as the Inaugural Claude Ryan Lecture in Catholic Social Thought, at McGill University in Montreal. In December 2006, he addressed the President, Prime Minister, and Speakers of the Polish Parliament in the Royal Castle in Warsaw. His keynote address culminated a week-long celebration of human rights and the Polish constitution.

In 2000, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, where he is on the Board of Advisors. For the academic year 2007-08, he was the Robert J. Randall Distinguished Visiting Professor in Christian Culture at Providence College.

His books and articles have appeared through the University of Notre Dame Press, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, Fordham University Press, the Review of Metaphysics, the Journal of Law and Religion, the Review of Politics, and several law journals (both American and European).

Points of Interest

Dr. Hittinger is considered by many the world’s leading expert on the history of Catholic Social Teaching. Hittinger’s historically important body of work over the years on Catholic moral and social philosophy and theology is rooted in natural law theory and Thomistic philosophy, but also animated by St. Augustine’s thought and thus consistently sensitive to historical contexts and arenas for moral and theological disputation. His life’s work elucidates the point that Catholic social teaching is not only an articulate defense of the dignity of the human person, but perhaps more fundamentally an elucidation of the dignity of society. Indeed, Hittinger enables us to see that one cannot properly defend the dignity of the person without also showing the dignity of societies in which human persons – as naturally familial, political, and ecclesial animals – seek their own perfection in communion with others.