Dr. William Fahey

Dr. William Edmund Fahey is the third president of Thomas More College and founding President of the Center for the Renewal of Christian Culture. Born at the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia while his father served as a Marine Corps officer in Vietnam, Fahey spent his youth in the midwest and Maine, where his family has lived since the 1630s.

Dr. Fahey earned an Honors A.B. from Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio) in Classics and History. Afterwards, Fahey pursued postgraduate studies in Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), where he completed the M.Phil. (mode A) in Ancient History, a degree which seems to have been abolished shortly after his tenure there, perhaps in view of his leisurely approach to education. It was in the “auld grey toon” of St. Andrews that Fahey had two fateful meetings: First with the woman who would become his wife and second with that inspiring man of letters, Russell Amos Kirk. William and Amy Fahey would be assistants to Dr. Kirk at his ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan during the last years of Kirk’s life and later to Mrs. Annette Kirk through the founding years of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

At the Catholic University of America Fahey studied in the Department of Classics, and earned both the M.A. and Ph.D. (with highest distinction) through the Early Christian Studies program. He has held a number of distinguished recognitions and fellowships– including the Lord Acton History Award, a Salvatori Fellowship (Heritage Foundation), the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship (Intercollegiate Studies Institute), and an Earhart Fellowship.

Dr. Fahey came to Thomas More College of Liberal Arts after nearly a decade of undergraduate and graduate level teaching at Christendom College (Front Royal, Virginia), where he established the Department of Classical and Early Christian Studies, of which he was Chairman.

Previously, Dr. Fahey had taught at The Catholic University of America, as well as at Brookfield Academy (Wisconsin), and the American Academy (St. David’s, Pennsylvania). He has also taught abroad in Germany, and for many years in the Western Civilization Honors Program held at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, England.

Dr. Fahey’s scholarly interests extend from the Classical World through the Fathers of the Church to the importance of Agrarian thought on past and contemporary culture. In addition to Cicero, Virgil, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory the Great, he has an especial interest in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Fr. Vincent McNabb. He has been published in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, The St. Austin Review, Faith & Reason, The University Bookman, Classical World, and The Classical Bulletin. He hopes one day to return to his translation of St. Robert Bellarmine’s political writings.

Dr. Fahey is a Benedictine Oblate (postulant) with the Monastery of Our Lady of the Annunciation (Clear Creek, Oklahoma), a somewhat errant Knight of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, and by appointment of Governor Matthew Beven a Kentucky Colonel (a great honor he shares with Roy Rogers, Winston Churchill, and Ronald Reagan).

He and his wife, Amy—a doctor in English literature from Washington University, St. Louis and a Visiting Fellow at Thomas More College—have five children. Together William and Amy Fahey edit the “Civilized Reader” at Crisis Magazine.


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