Douglas Christie, professor emeritus of theological studies in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, has been named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 2024-25 academic year.
The Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Visiting Scholar Program has offered undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars since 1956. The program’s purpose is to contribute to an institution’s intellectual life by creating opportunities for an exchange of ideas between the visiting scholars and the resident faculty and students.
Christie is among 14 distinguished scholars from across the nation who were selected to participate in the Visiting Scholars Program. Participants give public lectures, participate in classroom discussions and seminars, and meet informally with faculty and students at the institutions they visit. Christie is LMU’s first-ever Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar since LMU was inducted as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 2018.
Christie joined LMU’s Theological Studies Department in 1994 and retired from LMU in 2023 after 29 years with the university. His research and teaching on contemplative thought and practice focus on ancient and medieval Christianity, spirituality and ecology, and the idea of the desert as a place of spiritual encounter.
He is the author of “The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism” (Oxford, 1993), “The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology” (Oxford, 2013), and “The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life” (Oxford, 2022). Christie has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013-15 he served as co-director with Jennifer Abe, Ph.D., professor of psychology, of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity.
