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The following memorial tribute for Thomas Levergood was submitted by Professor Jennifer Frey, delivered at the wake held for Thomas at Gavin House, August 13th, 2021.

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I met Thomas Levergood in 2010 here in Hyde Park.  Gavin House didn’t exist, Lumen Christi was still working out of an office in one of those protestant churches on Woodlawn, and I think Thomas had a room at Calvert House too, if memory serves.  I can’t remember how exactly I got on Thomas’s radar,  but I had just moved to Chicago with my husband, who was starting a TT job in the philosophy department.  I was trying to write my dissertation and had just given birth to our third child, also named Thomas, and I had no childcare and no job.  I was vulnerable, to put it mildly, and wondering how on earth I was going to finish my PhD.  Thomas immediately asked me to come work for him and he promised me that he was supportive of women crazy enough to have three kids under five while still in an elite graduate program. 

True to his word, Thomas supported me well, better than I could have ever hoped.  He, more than anyone else, made me feel at home in Hyde Park.  He, more than anyone else, believed in my potential for success in academia. Over the next three years, Thomas gave me incredible latitude to organize and participate in events on campus, and he allowed me to take over and help expand the summer seminar program.  Thanks to Thomas Levergood, I’ve had dinners and incredible conversations with the likes of Marilynne Robinson, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Gilles Emery (to name only a few), I’ve studied Milosz with Adam Zagajewski and Guardini with Robert Wilken, I’ve hosted a workshop in Rome on philosophy and I’ve met too many cardinals and bishops for me to name them all.  And Thomas allowed me to do all of this as my family continued to grow.  He encouraged me to bring my infants with me to all Lumen Christi events, including the very fancy ones and the events abroad. He never flinched when they did baby things like scream or poop.  He loved it and I loved him for it.  

Many of my closest friends and collaborators are people I first met through Thomas Levergood, under the auspices of Lumen Christi.  It’s astonishing, really, the extent to which Lumen Christi has shaped both my personal story and professional life.  Without Thomas, I might have still had a career in academia, but not one as fulfilling or rich as I have now.    

I think one of Thomas’s lasting impacts on my life is that he really encouraged me to become more integrated as an intellectual.  He took me in as an analytic philosopher who happened to be Catholic and forced me to think about how my faith could become a part of my intellectual life and not simply something I practiced in the private sphere.  I am grateful to him for that encouragement, and for the countless examples of such integration he brought into my life, because without it I surely would have went in a different, more familiar direction.  Because of Thomas, I do consider myself a Catholic intellectual, as in love with and devoted to this tradition as he was, and without apology.  

Thomas Levergood was a visionary.  He saw the ways that universities were failing to live up to their missions and he saw the need for an institute like Lumen Christi, an institute grounded explicitly in the search for Christian wisdom as the center of higher learning.  The need for Lumen Christi is greater now than ever before, and one of the many reasons that the loss of Thomas is so hard to bear.  But it is up to those of us who loved Thomas and owe him so much to carry his great legacy forward.  I hope and pray that we will, in loving memory of him.