Michael Murphy

Director, Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage and Senior Lecturer, Department of Theology

Michael P. Murphy is Director of Loyola’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. His research interests are in Theology and Literature, Sacramental Theology, and the literary/political cultures of Catholicism—but he also thinks and writes about issues in eco-theology and social ethics. Dr. Murphy, a Senior Lecturer in the Theology Department, is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. Dr. Murphy's first book, A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination (Oxford), was named a "Distinguished Publication" in 2008 by the American Academy of Religion. His most recent scholarly work is an edited volume (with Melissa Bradshaw), this need to dance/this need to kneel: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith (Wipf and Stock, 2019). Dr. Murphy was also the second Director of Loyola University Chicago’s Catholic Studies Interdisciplinary Minor Program (serving from 2012-2021). His work explores the idea that the Catholic intellectual tradition is not only an essential resource for content but is also one with a deeply ingrained interdisciplinary method as well. This scholarly orientation is also a pedagogy—whether in the classroom or in Hank Center programming—and it seeks to bear its nourishing mark in every expression.