Michael Novak

Michael Novak (born September 9, 1933, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 17, 2017, Washington, D.C.) was an American lay theologian, economist, historian, and author who became a prominent neoconservative political theorist. He is regarded as one of the most important Roman Catholic thinkers of his generation.

At age 14, Novak entered the seminary of the Congregation of Holy Cross at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He earned a B.A. from Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts, in 1956 and a B.A. in theology from Gregorian University in Rome in 1958. He began graduate theological study at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., but he left two years later, within months before ordination. He subsequently entered Harvard University, earning an M.A. in the history and philosophy of religion in 1966.

Novak covered the Second Vatican Council for several periodicals from 1963 to 1964 and wrote a major report on the second session, The Open Church (1964). He became a professor of humanities at Stanford University that year, and in 1967 he visited three of his students in Vietnam, where he also served as a monitor of national elections. Initially a supporter of the Vietnam War, his experience in the country led to him becoming a vocal opponent. From 1968 to 1973 he taught at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. He helped launch the humanities program of the Rockefeller Foundation (1973–74), and he taught religion at Syracuse University (1976–78) and at the University of Notre Dame (1987–88). From 1978 he was a resident scholar in religion and public policy for the American Enterprise Institute. In 1981 he served as U.S. ambassador for the United Nations Human Rights Commission. For his work in religion, economics, and cultural criticism, he won the 1994 Templeton Prize from the Templeton Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes research concerning the interaction of religion and the sciences and humanities.

Novak was a prolific writer, and his writings regularly appeared in such magazines and journals as Christianity and Crisis, National Review, and the Catholic ecumenical periodical First Things. Among his many books are Belief and Unbelief (1965), Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience (1967, with Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel and Robert McAfee Brown), The Experience of Nothingness (1970), The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993), and No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Non-Believers (2008).