Bio

Christopher Pramuk lives with his wife Lauri, a pediatrician, and their children in the Denver area, where Chris serves as the University Chair of Ignatian Thought and Imagination and Associate Professor of Theology at Regis University. He currently serves as the President of the International Thomas Merton Society.

Chris is the author of six books, including Hope Sings, So Beautiful: Graced Encounters Across the Color Line (2013), a sustained meditation on race relations in society and church, and two award-winning studies of Thomas Merton: At Play in Creation: Merton’s Awakening to the Feminine Divine (2015), and Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (2009), recipient of the International Thomas Merton Society’s 2011 “Thomas Merton Award,” a.k.a., “The Louie,” its highest honor. Chris’s numerous essays and pastoral writings have appeared in America magazine, Theological Studies, Cross Currents, and the prayer journal Give Us This Day. His newest book, The Artist Alive: Explorations in Music, Art, and Theology (Anselm Academic), is the fruition of his many years of using music, poetry, and the arts with young people in the theology classroom.

After graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1987, in his hometown of Lexington, Chris moved to Colorado to study music, was drawn deeper into Buddhist and Christian spirituality, and began teaching theology at Regis Jesuit High School in Denver. After completing doctoral studies at the University of Notre Dame, Chris taught at Xavier University for ten years, teaching courses at the intersection of spirituality, race, the arts, theology, and social justice. In 2015 he was honored by students in Alpha Sigma Nu, the national Jesuit Honor Society, as Xavier’s Teacher of the Year. The following year he was recognized by his faculty colleagues with the Roger A. Fortin Award for Outstanding Teaching and Scholarship in the Humanities. In 2017, he and his family returned to the Denver area, where his position at Regis University builds from his passion for the principles that animate Ignatian spirituality and Jesuit pedagogy.

Two of Chris’s four children were adopted from post-earthquake Haiti, one of the many experiences of cross-cultural encounter he writes about in Hope Sings, So Beautiful. A lifelong musician and student of African American history and spirituality, Chris spoke in 2017 on racial justice, resurrection faith, and the legacy of the slave songs and spirituals for the national assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) in Orlando. He blogs regularly and posts resources on spirituality, culture, and racial justice at HopeSingsSoBeautiful.org.