Mr. Hudson,

Great piece on Adler. Readers should also know that he was a great one for practical jokes. During my time at Thomas Aquinas College, he came to give a lecture - this would have been back in teh 90s. Although I can't confirm it, I believe one of my classmates, familiar with Adler's sense of humor, had Dominoes Pizza delivered during the lecture.

"A large Pepperoni with extra cheese for Mr. Mortimer Adler!" the Dominoes delivery man announced, interrupting Adler. The courier then came marching down the center aisle of the lecture hall and placed the pizza on a table beside Adler's rostrum. It was great fun.

Only momentarily at a loss, Adler made a quick recovery and with the hint of a smile, continued his lecture as if nothing had happened.

I can't remember whethered he offered the delivery man a tip....

On another note, I'm surprised you don't have "How to Read a Book" on your list of Adler pennings. I don't know how much of it was Adler and how much his co-author Charles Van Doren, but it seems to serve as the skeleton key not only for Adler's books but for his beloved Great Books.

JOB

I remember his visits to the college well! And the pizza episode! He was fond of reminding us that we were all a bunch of know-nothings, and would continue to be until we were in our sixties. That was his age for wisdom--sixty something. Now that I'm in my forties I couldn't agree more!

We are a not-for-profit educational organization, founded by Mortimer Adler and we have recently made an exciting discovery--three years after writing the wonderfully expanded third edition of How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren made a series of thirteen 14-minute videos, lively discussing the art of reading. The videos were produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica. For reasons unknown, sometime after their original publication, these videos were lost.

Three hours with Mortimer Adler on one DVD. A must for libraries and classroom teaching the art of reading.

I cannot over exaggerate how instructive these programs are--we are so sure that you will agree, if you are not completely satisfied, we will refund your donation.

Please go here to see a clip and learn more:

http://www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm

PHILOSOPHY PIONEER ENTERS CHURCH

by Brian McGuire, National Catholic Register Staff Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Mortimer J. Adler, popularizer of classical philosophy, has been received into the Catholic Church, the Register has learned. Adler, 97, was confirmed at his request last December, according to Bishop Pierre Dumaine, retired of San Jose, Calif., who presided at the ceremony.

Observers of the renowned, Jewish-born thinker speculate that his protracted silence on the milestone owes to his desire for privacy and his frail health. The Register learned of the development from a source close to Adler; Bishop Dumaine confirmed the tip while urging respect for Adler's privacy.

Adler's friends and admirers contacted for comment were pleased to hear of his conversion, which ends years of courtship with the Catholic faith.

"We've been waiting for Mortimer for 100 years," said Notre Dame philosophy professor Ralph McInerney. "It's not the road to Damascus, but it seems in retrospect to have a certain inevitability about it. It was all those years waiting in the wings."

Deal Hudson, editor of the Catholic monthly magazine Crisis and a close friend of Adler's, said his initial response after hearing of the conversion was "one of relief."

"There is no doubt that Mortimer has done as much for the Catholic intellectual tradition as anyone in the United States in this century," Hudson said.

"As a personal friend of [Jacques] Maritain and [Etienne] Gilson, it's only appropriate that Mortimer should join hands with these great neo-Thomists of his own generation as a Catholic."

Hudson detailed Adler's contribution to American Catholic letters in an introduction he wrote for a recent reprint of Adler's 1967 book "The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes".

A convert from Protestantism himself, Hudson said Adler's writings on human nature, freedom and Aristotle were instrumental in his own conversion several years ago to the Catholic Faith.

Adler is perhaps best known for his 1940 bestseller "How to Read a Book" and 1978's "Aristotle for Everybody". McInerney once referred to the former as Adler's "original sin" because it led many to think of him as a popularizer rather than a serious scholar.

THOMISTIC REVIVAL

Adler was also widely known for his many appearances on William F. Buckley's Sunday-morning talk show "Firing Line."

It was in these appearances that Adler introduced countless Americans to the 13th-century scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, leaving audiences astounded by his knowledge of the great Catholic saint and perplexed by his lack of personal belief.

Indeed, it was Adler's contribution, as a non-believer, to the revival of Thomas Aquinas studies in the United States during the 1930s and '40s that earned him the joke-title "peeping Thomist."

During this period of his life, Adler was a frequent lecturer at the annual meetings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and at schools like the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Notre Dame.

Adler would later acknowledge that his lifelong study of Thomas Aquinas had prepared the way for his eventual conversion.

In his 1991 autobiography "A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror", Adler wrote that it was his "continuous effort, from 1943 to 1978, to improve the philosophical arguments for the existence of God," which formed the philosophical "preamble" to his 1984 conversion to Christianity as an Episcopalian, the faith of his second wife, Caroline.

But it was Adler's lifelong philosophical flirtation with the Catholic faith that prompted him to explain, in his 1977 memoir Philosopher at Large, why he had never in fact become a Catholic.

In that book, he recalled that non-Catholic colleagues began to wonder about his inclinations toward Rome as early as 1938.

Rumors began to circulate, Adler wrote, that he and Robert Hutchins, then-president of the University of Chicago, had been secretly baptized -- "that we had been seen on our knees at the altar rail of the Catholic Church near the university campus, and so on."

According to Adler, it was not only his fondness for Thomas Aquinas that prompted these rumors, but also the conversion of many of his students to the Catholic faith.

Adler wrote that he was no more responsible for students who studied philosophy becoming Catholic than he was for students who studied Marx becoming Marxists.

To Catholic colleagues who wondered why he wouldn't convert, Adler explained that his state of mind was comparable to what Thomas Aquinas described as "dead faith."

Returning to the same question 14 years later in "A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror", Adler wrote: "There were moments in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s that I put the question (why I did not become a Catholic) to myself. As I look back on the answers that I then gave myself, I think the reasons I gave were superficial. They cloaked my disinclination to become religious."

In Thomas Merton's best-selling 1948 autobiography "The Seven Story Mountain", Adler makes an appearance as one of the "neo-Thomists" who had taken Merton's alma mater, Columbia University, by storm in the late 1920s.

A young Adler and his colleagues are recalled by Merton for their devotion to the classics and their intense philosophical discussions of God in an age of increasing skepticism and academic specialization.

CHALLENGES THE SYSTEM

A high school dropout who had to wait until 1983 to receive his bachelor's degree from Columbia, Adler began to challenge educational practice and standards early on.

At Hutchins' invitation, he left Columbia for a teaching position at the University of Chicago in 1930 at the age of 27. He taught there until 1945, when he took a seven-year leave of absence to edit the "Great Books of the Western World" series. It was also in Chicago that Adler began his work as co-editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In 1952, Adler left the University of Chicago for San Francisco, where he founded the Institute for Philosophical Research, with which he remains associated.

Adler is a lifelong promoter of educational reform, from his earliest days as an agitator at Columbia University to his decision, in 1977, to attempt a reform of American elementary and secondary education with his Paideia Project for inner-city public schools.

Adler was instrumental in the founding of the original "great books" program -- organized around focused reading and open discussion of seminal works -- at St. John's College in 1937; this helped inspire similar programs in other schools, including the Catholic St. Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif., and St. Mary's College in Morago, Calif., In 1950.

Said McInerney, himself one of the world's top Thomas Aquinas scholars: "You don't decide [to believe]. He knew that better than anyone. It's a grace."

But Adler's long search for truth, McInerney added, didn't hurt his chances.

"You are certainly putting yourself in the target area for grace when you pursue the truth. It's one of the things closest to the spiritual life -- the intellect."

Max Weismann, co-founder, with Adler, of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas in Chicago, went a step further than McInerney, saying of Adler: "He was always a Catholic at heart."

by Brian McGuire, National Catholic Register Staff Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Mortimer J. Adler, popularizer of classical philosophy, has been received into the Catholic Church, the Register has learned. Adler, 97, was confirmed at his request last December, according to Bishop Pierre Dumaine, retired of San Jose, Calif., who presided at the ceremony.

Observers of the renowned, Jewish-born thinker speculate that his protracted silence on the milestone owes to his desire for privacy and his frail health. The Register learned of the development from a source close to Adler; Bishop Dumaine confirmed the tip while urging respect for Adler's privacy.

Adler's friends and admirers contacted for comment were pleased to hear of his conversion, which ends years of courtship with the Catholic faith.

"We've been waiting for Mortimer for 100 years," said Notre Dame philosophy professor Ralph McInerney. "It's not the road to Damascus, but it seems in retrospect to have a certain inevitability about it. It was all those years waiting in the wings."

Deal Hudson, editor of the Catholic monthly magazine Crisis and a close friend of Adler's, said his initial response after hearing of the conversion was "one of relief."

"There is no doubt that Mortimer has done as much for the Catholic intellectual tradition as anyone in the United States in this century," Hudson said.

"As a personal friend of [Jacques] Maritain and [Etienne] Gilson, it's only appropriate that Mortimer should join hands with these great neo-Thomists of his own generation as a Catholic."

Hudson detailed Adler's contribution to American Catholic letters in an introduction he wrote for a recent reprint of Adler's 1967 book "The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes".

A convert from Protestantism himself, Hudson said Adler's writings on human nature, freedom and Aristotle were instrumental in his own conversion several years ago to the Catholic Faith.

Adler is perhaps best known for his 1940 bestseller "How to Read a Book" and 1978's "Aristotle for Everybody". McInerney once referred to the former as Adler's "original sin" because it led many to think of him as a popularizer rather than a serious scholar.

THOMISTIC REVIVAL

Adler was also widely known for his many appearances on William F. Buckley's Sunday-morning talk show "Firing Line."

It was in these appearances that Adler introduced countless Americans to the 13th-century scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, leaving audiences astounded by his knowledge of the great Catholic saint and perplexed by his lack of personal belief.

Indeed, it was Adler's contribution, as a non-believer, to the revival of Thomas Aquinas studies in the United States during the 1930s and '40s that earned him the joke-title "peeping Thomist."

During this period of his life, Adler was a frequent lecturer at the annual meetings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and at schools like the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Notre Dame.

Adler would later acknowledge that his lifelong study of Thomas Aquinas had prepared the way for his eventual conversion.

In his 1991 autobiography "A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror", Adler wrote that it was his "continuous effort, from 1943 to 1978, to improve the philosophical arguments for the existence of God," which formed the philosophical "preamble" to his 1984 conversion to Christianity as an Episcopalian, the faith of his second wife, Caroline.

But it was Adler's lifelong philosophical flirtation with the Catholic faith that prompted him to explain, in his 1977 memoir Philosopher at Large, why he had never in fact become a Catholic.

In that book, he recalled that non-Catholic colleagues began to wonder about his inclinations toward Rome as early as 1938.

Rumors began to circulate, Adler wrote, that he and Robert Hutchins, then-president of the University of Chicago, had been secretly baptized -- "that we had been seen on our knees at the altar rail of the Catholic Church near the university campus, and so on."

According to Adler, it was not only his fondness for Thomas Aquinas that prompted these rumors, but also the conversion of many of his students to the Catholic faith.

Adler wrote that he was no more responsible for students who studied philosophy becoming Catholic than he was for students who studied Marx becoming Marxists.

To Catholic colleagues who wondered why he wouldn't convert, Adler explained that his state of mind was comparable to what Thomas Aquinas described as "dead faith."

Returning to the same question 14 years later in "A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror", Adler wrote: "There were moments in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s that I put the question (why I did not become a Catholic) to myself. As I look back on the answers that I then gave myself, I think the reasons I gave were superficial. They cloaked my disinclination to become religious."

In Thomas Merton's best-selling 1948 autobiography "The Seven Story Mountain", Adler makes an appearance as one of the "neo-Thomists" who had taken Merton's alma mater, Columbia University, by storm in the late 1920s.

A young Adler and his colleagues are recalled by Merton for their devotion to the classics and their intense philosophical discussions of God in an age of increasing skepticism and academic specialization.

Deal - Thanks for this post - it's inspired me to read more from Mortimer Adler. Many times over the years I've thought with gratitude of the wise Dominican who had us read The Authentic Person in my high school philosophy class during the late 70's. Your description of Adler as both clear-thinking and fun-loving seems right in character. What a privilege for you to have known him well.

I read "Ten Philosophical Mistakes" some years ago and was surprised at its un-academic tone. It seemed so clear and modestly reasoned that it had to be true, much like C.S. Lewis or Chesterton. I still think about his ideas sometimes.

I never thought about whether Adler was a Catholic or not, but looking back on the book, I can see how Catholic his ideas were. He is the kind of writer who not only educates you, but makes you feel better. Great comfort reading.

It is the first time I have ever read anything about Adler, and I am glad to have read it. God rest his soul; he is proof that you can find peace and solace in philosophy -- at least the right kind of philosophy.