Dr. Thomas Ryba is the Notre Dame Theologian-in-Residence at St. Tom’s and a continuing lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at Purdue. Dr. Ryba completed his undergraduate studies in philosophy and anthropology and holds master’s and doctoral degrees in the history and literature of religions from Northwestern University.
His primary interests are systematic theology, the history of ideas, and the historical relations between theology, religion, philosophy, science, and ideology. Dr. Ryba is the author of The Essence of Phenomenology and Its Meaning for the Scientific Study of Religion (1991) and over fifty articles on theology, philosophical theology, theories of religion, and cinema. He is also principal editor and contributor to The Comity and Grace of Method (2004), one of the contributors to Revelation: Catholic and Muslim Perspectives (2006), co-editor with Sandor Goodhart of For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth (2008) and co-editor with Vern Redekop and contributor to: René Girard and Creative Mimesis (2014) and René Girard and Creative Reconciliation (2014), and The Optics of the Antichrist and The Abrahamic Traditions: A Significant Structures Approach (2015).
A member of the editorial board of Religion since 1991, he was North American Editor of from 2004-2007. He is also on the editorial Boards of Humanitas, Phenomenological Inquiry, Agathos, and between 2008 and 2011, he was Vice President of the World Phenomenology Institute. He has just been added to the newly re-constituted editorial board of the Analecta Husserliana (2014) and to the scientific board of a series on the philosophy of A.-T. Tymieniecka to be published by the Italian book house, Morcelliana (2014). Dr. Ryba was the recipient of a Templeton Foundation grant in 1999 for his course “Homologies and Heterologies in the Development of Theology and Science,” and in 2006 received a Metanexus Foundation Grant to found a society for Science and Religion dialogue at Purdue University. Dr. Ryba has been Theologian in Residence at the St. Thomas Aquinas Center since 1990.
Dr. Ryba lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, with his wife, Christine Mary, and his mother in law, Rosemary.