I graduated from Cathedral in 2002 and was heavily involved with the cross country and track teams. Of the two, cross country was my real love and evolved into marathon running during my college years. Academically, I think I took just about every AP class available. Judged by the amount of studying we had to do together, it was basically a separate club activity.

I had always attended private schools growing up for a variety of reasons: smaller class sizes, generally higher quality of teaching, less adversarial social environments, etc. These reasons also applied to choosing Cathedral, especially its quality AP course offerings. But it was also important that an education at Cathedral contained a strong religious component. I say religious rather than Catholic because my family had membership in the United Methodist Church. So while it was not specifically important that my high school be Catholic, it was important that the education offered have a moral component. Cathedral has this and really helped me transition from being a boy to a young man.

As someone who has decided to become a lifelong academic, I think I most miss the lack of adult responsibilities that prevent me from studying all day every day. It was at Cathedral that my love of learning probably began. Of all the memories I could mention, one truly stands above the rest. I was fortunate that my freshman year overlapped with Principal Leo Cancellare’s final year. Our basketball team was having a great year, ranked number two and playing the number one team in the city one night. I was at the game and we were losing, badly at times. Then Leo Cancellare came into the gym, obviously frail and clearly having trouble walking. You could hear a pin drop. He gathered the strength to lead us in a cheer, the crowd became as loud as any I have heard at the most rowdy college sporting events, and we somehow won the game. Principal Cancellare died later that year.

In 2005 I obtained a B.A. in religious history with a minor in communication studies from the Texas Tech Honors College. In 2008 I received a Master of Theological Studies from the Boston University School of Theology. I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University.

I live in Boston, MA and my main job is finishing my dissertation to complete my Ph.D. My area of research is the relationship between religion and science and related issues in religious pluralism. There is a clear trajectory from religion courses at Cathedral, from specifics of Catholicism to world religions, to what has become my career. I am also the communications director for a church in Newton, MA and the co-founder of theonerd.com, a site dedicated to the intersection of philosophy, theology, and various nerd cultures. A special focus of that website is understanding and preventing online bullying, perhaps impacted by the fact that I found acceptance at Cathedral while also being a lifelong video game nerd.

“What are you proudest of?”
After starting my Ph.D. program at Claremont Graduate University I became the President of the Society for Philosophy and Religion at Claremont and helped found an annual student conference that has since spun off to include a published journal. The first year of the conference attracted the interest of the Dean of Philosophy at the Pontifical Institute for Philosophy and Theology in Pune, India who was visiting California at the time. He ended up giving the keynote lecture at the conference and I ended up being a visiting professor in India for a semester. It was then that I knew a Ph.D. in theology was more than a passion and something with which I could succeed.

“What lesson from Cathedral do you carry with you?”
In a culture currently full of awful rhetoric, I remember that poking fun and joking around with others stops before words turn deeply hurtful or to physical violence. We certainly goofed around and pulled pranks while I was at Cathedral, but things never turned insulting or dangerous. That general atmosphere is something I still carry with me and often speak about to popular audiences.

“Do you have a message (lesson/observation) for a current Cathedral student?”
Even if you don’t care about Christianity or any other religions, take what you learn about them at Cathedral seriously. They are important forces in the world and you will be a better contributing member of society the more you know about them. Basic literacy in Christianity as well as the other major world religions, I would argue, is a drastically needed component of any high school curriculum today.