About E. Christian Brugger

Christian Brugger was born June 29, 1964, in New York City. He was the second child of Eugene C. Brugger, a first generation, German-American Lutheran, who had been born in the back of his father’ s delicatessen in Brooklyn on August 1, 1929, and became a graduate of NYU and NYU Law School; and of Adalyn Sherwood Kearns, a Methodist from High Point, North Carolina, who was a débutante and a graduate of Duke University. Christian was baptized at St. George Episcopal Church in lower Manhattan on December 6, 1964.

Due to the decline in public education in New York City in the 1960s, the Bruggers moved to the New Jersey suburbs in 1967, where they spent the next fifteen years. Brugger grew up as a believing but non-practicing Protestant. In 1977, he experienced two significant events that shaped his life: his parents divorced, and he had a personal conversion to Jesus Christ through contact with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

Brugger began undergraduate studies in chemistry at Seton Hall University in New Jersey in the Fall of 1982. At the same time, he connected with a new religious community in the Newark Archdiocese, the Brotherhood of Hope, with which he remained closely affiliated for the next ten years. Brugger entered the Catholic Church in his freshman year of college. In 1985 he transferred to Rutgers University in New Brunswick and graduated in 1987 with a B.A. in Biology.

He left the Brotherhood in 1992 and began M.A. studies in moral theology, again at Seton Hall University. In 1994 he married Melissa Duggan, a young and beautiful cradle Catholic from Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, who was then working as a geriatrics recreational therapist. After Brugger completed his M.A. in 1994, he and Melissa moved to Somerville, Massachusetts, and he began studies at Harvard Divinity School. In 1995, their first child, Rose Laetare, was born.

After Brugger graduated from Harvard in 1996 with a Masters in moral philosophy, the family moved to England, and he studied at Oxford University. In 1997 he received a Masters in Christian Ethics from Oriel College, Oxford. The same year, their first son, Christian Augustine, was born. Brugger graduated in 2000 with a D.Phil. from St. Hugh’ s College, Oxford. His dissertation supervisors were John M. Finnis of University College, Oxford, and Oliver O’Donovan of Christ Church College. Brugger and his family spent his fourth and final year of doctoral study with the Jesuits at Die Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich, generously funded by fellowships from the Earhart Foundation and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

In 2000, Brugger became an Assistant Professor of Ethics in the Religious Studies Department at Loyola University New Orleans. That same year, the Bruggers’ third child, Mary Christine, was born. In 2002 he became a Senior Fellow at the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, which turned his attention to issues in bioethics. In 2003, Notre Dame University Press published his first book, Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition, a reworking of his doctoral dissertation. The same year, a fourth child, Sophia Grace, was born and one month later died of an infection.

Brugger moved in 2004 to the Institute for the Psychological Sciences (IPS), a Catholic graduate school of clinical psychology in Arlington, Virginia, and began teaching courses in theology and philosophy. In 2006 he was promoted to Associate Professor and became the Director of Integrative Research overseeing the IPS’s scholarly effort to integrate clinical psychology with relevant truths of philosophical and theological anthropology. In 2006 the Bruggers also welcomed their fifth child, Edmund Peter.

While at IPS, Brugger published widely in moral theology, moral philosophy, and in the interdisciplinary field of psychology and Christian anthropology. In 2007 he also taught as an adjunct professor of bioethics for the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America and became the Senior Fellow of Ethics at the Culture of Life Foundation in Washington, D.C. On that organization’s website, he publishes a bi-monthly article in bioethics.

In July 2008, Brugger became an Associate Professor of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado. �In 2010 he was awarded�the J. Francis Stafford Chair of Moral Theology, the first endowed chair in the seminary’s history.�He serves as a bioethical advisor to the bishops of Denver and to the Denver chapter of the Catholic Medical Association. �He is also a member of the board of directors of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

The Bruggers welcomed their third son, Thomas Athanasius Brugger, into the world in October 2009. Christian, Melissa, their children, the family’ s dog, hedgehog, snakes, skunk, tarantulas, gerbil, and toad live together in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, twenty-five miles west of Denver.