Dr. Paul Griffiths of the University of Illinois at Chicago will discuss “Faithful Reason and Reasonable Faith: How Catholics Know What They Know” on Thursday, Sept. 21, at Holy Spirit Preparatory School as part of the school’s ongoing lecture series. The lecture begins promptly at

7:30 p.m. in the liberal arts building on the upper school campus located at 4449 Northside Drive near the intersection with Mt. Paran Road.

Refreshments are served at 7 p.m.

Griffiths’ main intellectual interests and topics of publication include Catholic theology and philosophy; philosophical and political questions arising from religious diversity; fourth- and fifth-century African-Christian thought and Gupta-period Indian Buddhist thought. At the lecture he will be discussing what makes Catholic faith reasonable and how faith and reason together produce what Catholics know.

He is the Schmitt Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois, and he has a bachelor of arts degree in theology and a master of philosophy in classical Indian religion and Sanskrit from the University of Oxford. In 1983 he was awarded a doctorate in Buddhist studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has formerly held faculty positions at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame.

He has also published numerous books and many scholarly articles, translations and book reviews. In a more popular vein, he is a frequent contributor to First Things and other Catholic journals of opinion.