HIBBS, Thomas S.

Thomas S. HibbsThomas Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University, where he oversees a number of interdisciplinary programs, including the Honors Program, a Great Texts major, and the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. As dean, Hibbs is involved with student recruitment, enrollment management, development of curricula, and faculty recruitment and development.

With degrees from the University of Dallas and the University of Notre Dame, Hibbs taught at Boston College (BC) for 13 years, where he was full professor and department chair in philosophy. At BC, he also served on the Steering Committee for BC's Initiative for the Future of the Church and on the Sub-Committee on Catholic Sexual Teaching. At Baylor, he has been involved in ecumenical discussions of the work of John Courtney Murray and John Paul II.

In addition to teaching a variety of interdisciplinary courses, Hibbs teaches in the fields of medieval philosophy, contemporary virtue ethics, and philosophy and popular culture. Hibbs' popular BC course on Nihilism in American Culture was featured in a Boston Globe article. In BC's interdisciplinary core curriculum, Perspectives, Hibbs was responsible for introducing texts by African-American authors (Douglass and DuBois) and female authors (Wollstonecraft, Woolf, and Flannery O'Connor). His graduate courses have been cross-listed in the departments of religion and political science.

Hibbs has written two scholarly books on Aquinas, including Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles, and a book on popular culture entitled Shows About Nothing. Two other books include Aquinas, Ethics, and the Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice (Indiana University Press) and Arts of Darkness: American Noir and The Lost Code of Redemption (Spence Publications). Hibbs has recently published scholarly articles on MacIntyre and Aquinas (Review of Politics), on Anselm (Anselm Studies), and on Pascal (International Philosophical Quarterly). He also has written on film, culture, books and higher education in Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things, New Atlantis, The Dallas Morning News, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which his latest piece is a study of the ethical implications of the films of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Hibbs' movie reviews can be found here.

Called upon regularly to comment on film and popular culture, Hibbs has made more than 100 appearances on radio, including nationally syndicated NPR shows such as "The Connection," "On the Media" and "All Things Considered," as well as local NPR stations in Boston, Massachusetts; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Dallas, Texas; and Rochester, New York.

Hibbs speaks regularly at American high schools and universities and also at conferences in Europe.