From engineering to theology and Oxford to Hillsdale, new assistant professor of theology Jordan Wales said the underlying desire to see the coherency in the world, knowing, and the human person is what drove him to eventually earn his Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame.
Wales is this semester’s addition to Hillsdale’s philosophy and religion department.
“My interest had always been in seeking the whole perspective, and understanding education as a path or process of amassing information and understanding and growth in critical thinking, but also as the maturation of the human person and growth in the ability to discern the truth and to adhere to it,” Wales said. “That’s what I discovered was the goal of education at Hillsdale.”
With an undergraduate degree in engineering from Swarthmore College, Wales received the British Marshall scholarship, and began a one-year master’s degree program in cognitive science and natural language at the University of Edinburgh.
There, Wales and a group of students went out for coffee after a class on the philosophy of the mind. He said the students would talk about what made humans unique, the easy answer to which they found as consciousness, simply an advanced form of calculation.
Yet everything in the universe seems to complete some form of calculation, Wales said. By reducing the human person to simply calculation, the uniqueness was lost.
As this conversation arose again and again, Wales said someone would say something about God and a soul and personhood, wondering if that could be the locus of the sense of awe. But those questions, he said, were questions beyond the scope of the discipline as scientists.
“I thought, ‘I want to ask those questions. I want to pursue those possibilities,’” Wales said. “So I took my second year to study theology at Oxford in a post-graduate diploma program. There, I discovered that these were the questions that had interested the early Christians and great medieval thinkers, the question of the human person. And they answered that question in light of man being created in the image and likeness of God.”
Wales then received a National Science Foundation fellowship for doing a Ph.D. program in the sciences, and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University, where he pursued robotics and artificial intelligence.
“When we came back from the winter break, all of my friends were talking about the computer science journals they had been reading,” Wales said. “But I had been reading theology during the break, and I realized I had been in the wrong program.”
During his time at Carnegie Mellon, Wales had met his wife. He then left his program at Carnegie Mellon and went to Notre Dame, where he would graduate with a master’s and Ph.D. in theology.
Hillsdale Instructor in Philosophy Lee Cole also did his graduate work at Notre Dame and was in some of the same social circles as Wales.
Cole said he thinks Wales’ familiarity with late patristic, medieval thinking, and 20th century theology are complementary strengths and will enhance what is already happening in the philosophy and religion department.
“I expect that he’ll be a sort of work horse in the department,” Cole said. “I think he’ll challenge students to think about religion and theology in a very rigorous way. ”
Assistant Professor of History Matthew Gaetano also met Wales at Notre Dame, and said he felt an immediate camaraderie and intellectual friendship with Wales.
“He was in advanced robotics, is a very talented pianist, and was doing all these wonderful things in engineering, so he’s this remarkable talented human being, which I think fits Hillsdale really well and brings some new things to the table,” Gaetano said. “It’ll be great to have even more conversations with him about Augustine, about Gregory the Great, about late patristic theology, which is a fountain head of the Western tradition. I think that he’ll really deepen what it is we’re trying to do here.”
