The next step of a long-time UD professor and alumnus
This year we celebrate the retirement of various University of Dallas legends, including Father James Lehrberger, associate professor of philosophy, who has taught at UD for 46 years.
Lehrberger grew up in San Francisco and completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of San Francisco. At the time, other schools tried to recruit him, but Lehrberger couldn’t imagine leaving his home.
“You’re two hours away from everything,” Lehreberger said, recalling his youth in San Francisco. “Wine country across the bay, Yosemite, beaches, glorious weather.”
However, Lehrberger would be tempted towards a small college in Dallas in pursuit of his doctorate after hearing that two of his academic idols, Drs. Frederick Wilhelmsen and Willmoore Kendall, would be teaching there. And so, Lehrberger moved east to the University of Dallas and found a place to flourish in this small college.
When he planned on going to graduate school, Lehrberger never considered becoming a priest or entering monastic life. He wrestled with his vocation for two years. Throughout college and graduate school, Lehrberger was reading a variety of great thinkers, and his engagement with different texts strengthened his faith and drew him to consider the priesthood.
“[I read] many critical, sometimes quite critical, quite hostile attacks on the Faith, on Christianity. We read Marx, we read Hobbes,” Lehreberger shared, “but I never found them persuasive or convincing. But I did find Augustine and Aquinas and Newman more convincing.”
After two years of leaving the call to his vocation unheeded, Lehrberger finally applied to Cistercian Abbey, right across the street from UD’s campus. He entered alongside a friend who’d been with him through college and graduate school: Robert Maguire.
“The stability of monasticism and the liturgical life of monasticism is what appealed to me,” Lehrberger shared. But shortly after he was ordained, Lehrberger was asked to leave the country to teach for UD in Rome, a chance at which he ultimately jumped.
Alongside his duties as chaplain for the UD students, Lehrberger taught philosophy and theology in Rome from 1978-1981 and again from 1993-1995. Lehrberger got to witness Due Santi, UD’s Rome campus, open in June of 1994.
Lehrberger spent much of his early teaching years in Europe, teaching in Rome during the school years and traveling as chaplain with a Renaissance liturgical choir throughout Europe during the summers. “Oh, what a burden it was,” Lehrberger joked, “going to Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Madrid, Barcelona […] I probably know western Europe better than I know America!”
Having been in Italy for so long as a novitiate and later as a teacher, Lehrberger feels the Italian in himself even now. “I fell in love with Rome when I was there,” Lehrberger said. “I’ve never lost my taste for pasta, for vino or siestas.”
In Italy and in Irving, Lehrberger’s vocation as a priest is intertwined with his work as a teacher. “The interpretation of the texts that I’m teaching or the questions that I’m asking — those stand or fall on their own merits.” Lehrberger shared, “But rather, the mindset with which I see it — and I think it’s a very healthy one — enables me to ask questions that I know are not being generally asked.”
His mission as both priest and teacher has been supported throughout the years by the continuity in UD’s mission, which Lehrberger said has stayed firm, even throughout the moral turmoil of the 1960s. Although Lehrberger loves writing — and is particularly excited about an essay he wrote on Nietzsche and Aquinas — he has always put his students first during his time at UD, even before his scholarship.
Lehrberger will be teaching one final class next semester under an emeritus title, but he will be missed by the greater UD community and we wish him a well-deserved, restful retirement.