"Our Founders always wondered about how long it would last. The price of liberty is everlasting vigilance. You've got to be on your guard every minute or you will lose it." -- Michael Novak
Michael Novak (born 9 September, 1933) is an American Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat. The author of more than twenty-five books on the philosophy and theology of culture, Novak is most widely known for his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982). In 1994 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which included a million-dollar purse awarded at Buckingham Palace. He writes books and articles focused on capitalism, religion, and the politics of democratization.
Novak served as U.S. chief ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1981 and led the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1986. Additionally, Novak served on the board of directors of the now-defunct Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a faction of the Democratic Party, which sought to influence Democratic Party policies in the same direction that the Committee on the Present Danger later did. Novak is currently George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. As of 2004, he has claimed to be a lifelong Democrat, but he has supported many Republican candidates in recent years. On December 12, 2007 he declared his support for the presidential candidacy of Republican Mitt Romney (campaign suspended on February 7, 2008).
"Atheists in our midst are proof that all consciences can be accommodated here, even those that have no ground for holding that conscience is sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society.""Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.""Even rock stars are entitled to privacy.""If you've ever been in a position in your life where you just can't take any more, you just have to get through the next second, and the next second after that.""In God's eyes, there's not before and after. Every moment of time is simultaneous to God.""In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.""Individual freedom is a Jewish idea, but it's one of the functions of Christianity to make this idea universal.""Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn.""Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice.""Not all of those who cry "The poor, the poor!" will enter the kingdom of heaven.""Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.""Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.""The Lord God, the creator of Judaism and the God of Judaism and Christianity, empowered our minds and gave us the ability to question.""The universe moves in the direction of Liberty.""To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.""We really feel happier when things look bleak. Hope is endurance. Hope is holding on and going on and trusting in the Lord.""You're a sovereign as a citizen. If you're not involved in your government, you're not doing your job. In the long run that's very bad for the Republic."
Novak was born in 1933 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to a Slovak-American family.He was married to Karen Laub-Novak, a professional artist and illustrator, who died of cancer in August 2009. They have three children (Richard, Tanya, and Jana) and four grandchildren.
Novak earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and English (Summa Cum Laude) from Stonehill College in 1956, a Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus (a degree in theology), from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1958 andan M.A. in history and philosophy of religion from Harvard University in 1966.Novak attended Harvard University to study philosophy and religion, intending to obtain a doctorate in philosophy of religion. Novak stated that he thought the philosophy department was too focused on analytic philosophy, neglecting religion . He left Harvard after receiving his M.A., and began work as a writer.
Novak worked as a correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter during the second session of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, where he also got the opportunity to fulfill a book contract for a fellow reporter who was not able to complete the project. The result was Novak's second book, The Open Church, a journalistic account of the events of the second session of the Council.
His writings at the time were criticized by the more Conservative factions in the Church, and apostolic delegate Egidio Vagnozzi advised US Churchmen to silence him.
Early in his career, Michael Novak published two novels: The Tiber Was Silver (1961) and Naked I Leave (1970). At the time, he considered the modest $600 advance to be "a fortune."
Novak's friendship with the Presbyterian theologian Robert McAfee Brown during the Second Vatican Council led to a teaching post at Stanford University, where he became the first Roman Catholic to teach in the Humanities program. Novak taught at Stanford University from 1965 to 1968, during the key years of student revolt throughout California. During this period, he wrote A Time to Build (1967), discussing problems of belief and unbelief, ecumenism, sexuality, and war. In A Theology for Radical Politics (1969), Novak makes theological arguments in support of the New Left student movement, which he urged to advance the renewal of the human spirit rather than merely to reform social institutions. His book Politics: Realism and Imagination includes accounts of visiting American Vietnam War deserters in France ("Desertion"), the birth and development of the student movement at Stanford ("Green Shoots of Counter-Culture") and philosophical essays on nihilism and Marxism.
Novak left Stanford for a post as dean of a new "experimental" school at the newly-founded State University of New York at Old Westbury, Long Island.
Novak's writings during this period included the philosophical essay The Experience of Nothingness (1970, republished in 1998), in which he cautioned the New Left that utopianism could lead to alienation and rootlessness. Novak's novel Naked I Leave (1970) chronicles his experiences in California and in the Second Vatican Council and his journey from seminarian to reporter.
After serving at Old Westbury/SUNY from 1969 to 1972, Novak launched the humanities program at the Rockefeller Foundation in 1973-1974. In 1976, he accepted a tenured position at Syracuse University as University Professor and Ledden-Watson Distinguished Professor of Religion. In the fall semesters of 1987 and 1988, Novak held the W. Harold and Martha Welch chair as Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
In the spring of 1978, Novak joined the American Enterprise Institute for Social Policy Research as a Resident Scholar, a position he still holds . He remains at the American Enterprise Institute as the George Frederick Jewett Chair of Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy, and as the Institute’s Director of Social and Political Studies.
Novak is a frequent contributor to magazines and journals including First Things and National Review. He is a member of the Catholic Advisory Board for the Ave Maria Mutual Funds.
In 1994, he was a signer of the document Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Novak is a founding board member of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
Novak believes that Utopian beliefs can lead to the weakening of social bonds. He wrote that "the family is the human race's natural defense against utopianism." (The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism)
He states that religion can 'thrive only in a personal universe' and not universities or companies, and that Western Humanism, which he states is the leading belief system of most of academia, does not ask "the fundamental questions about the meaning and limits of personal experience" and that "they leave aside the mysteries of contingency and transitoriness, for the certainties of research, production, consumption." ("God in the Colleges," A New Generation: American and Catholic (1964))
Novak states that the Holy Trinity and God are often thought of in abstract and impersonal terms in philosophy, and that they should be "thought of as a Communion of Divine Persons...radiating his presence throughout creation, calling unworthy human beings to be his friends, and infusing into them his love so that they might love with it." (From “The Love That Moves the Sun,” in A Free Society Reader)
