How significant is Father Jaki’s legacy at Seton Hall? Could you briefly describe the activities of the Jaki Academy and the purpose for which it was established?
Father Stanley Jaki’s legacy at Seton Hall is both significant and enduring. As a Benedictine priest, physicist, and historian of science, he helped shape the intellectual character of Catholic scholarship at the university, especially in areas where theology and the empirical sciences intersect. His work demonstrated that the scientific enterprise emerged within a worldview shaped by Christian metaphysics, and he modelled a rigorous approach to dialogue between faith and reason that continues to influence faculty and students today.
The Jaki Academy was established to preserve, promote, and extend this legacy. Its activities include supporting research and publications related to science and religion, hosting lectures and academic events, and providing opportunities for emerging scholars to study themes central to Jaki’s thought such as cosmology, philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, and the historical relationship between Christianity and scientific development. In this way, the Academy serves as both a memorial to Father Jaki and a living academic community dedicated to advancing the kind of intellectually serious Catholic scholarship he championed.
Could you briefly describe how you first encountered Father Jaki’s work?
I entered the seminary at Seton Hall University in the fall of 2007. Father Jaki was a member of the Priest Community and Distinguished Professor of Physics at the university at that time. I was exposed to his writings during this period. Father Jaki returned to the Lord toward the end of my philosophical studies in the spring of 2009. Later, when Archbishop John Myers assigned me to study theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, I had the privilege of studying under Father Paul Haffner, a leading scholar of Father Jaki’s thought.
What aspects of Jaki’s work would you highlight as especially relevant in today’s world?
Several dimensions of Father Jaki’s scholarship speak with fresh relevance today. His insistence that science is not opposed to faith but rather flourishes within a worldview that affirms order, intelligibility, and the contingency of creation directly addresses contemporary debates surrounding atheism, scientism, and secular materialism. His analysis of the philosophical foundations of scientific inquiry, particularly his argument that the concept of a lawful and rational cosmos emerged uniquely and fruitfully within the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, offers an important corrective to purely technocratic or relativistic narratives about scientific progress. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, Jaki’s careful distinction between empirical science and metaphysics remains vital and helps prevent the misuse of scientific authority in areas where science alone cannot speak. Finally, Jaki’s critique of ideological worldviews masquerading as science, whether Marxism, reductionism, or determinism, equips scholars and students to discern the difference between sound inquiry and prevailing ideological assumptions.
Why do you think Jaki is being rediscovered today?
Jaki is being rediscovered because many of the tensions he addressed between faith and science, technology and humanity, and scientific progress and philosophical meaning have intensified in the twenty first century. As public discourse grows polarized and fragmented, his historically informed and philosophically grounded approach provides a model of clarity, rigor, and intellectual charity. Younger scholars searching for a synthesis that neither rejects science nor dissolves faith into vague spirituality find in Jaki a serious and deeply Catholic voice capable of speaking to modern scientific culture. Moreover, the rapid cultural acceleration surrounding AI, neuroscience, and cosmology has revived questions about human uniqueness, the origin of the universe, and the limits of scientific explanation, questions Jaki explored decades ahead of their current urgency. In this sense, his rediscovery is less a revival of a neglected figure and more a recognition that his insights were prophetic.
How does your field of research relate to Jaki’s thought?
My own work in the field of theology and science relates closely to themes at the heart of Father Jaki’s thought. Jaki emphasized that scientific and technological progress depends on deeper metaphysical commitments, especially the conviction that the world is coherent, intelligible, and governed by rational order. Research in complex systems, cybernetics, and machine learning, continually raises questions about agency, meaning, causality, ethics, and human uniqueness. These are the same philosophical questions Jaki believed must be addressed if science is to remain grounded rather than drift into reductionism or speculative ideology. My scholarship seeks to bring the riches of Saint Thomas Aquinas as well as the larger Catholic Intellectual and Social Traditions into dialogue with contemporary scientific and technological developments. In this way, my work continues the trajectory Jaki set, one that insists technology and scientific insight serve a fuller understanding of the human person, the created world, and the God who authored both.