Peter Fritz

Biography

Peter Joseph Fritz has been involved with Jesuit education since 1995, from his first days at St. Xavier High School (Cincinnati) through his Honors BA in studio art and theology at Loyola University Chicago and MA in theology at Boston College up to his years teaching at Holy Cross (2011–present). He holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, where he wrote his dissertation on the twentieth-century German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. At Holy Cross he teaches a wide variety of courses on Catholic and other Christian theologies, peacebuilding, capitalism, and reaching back to his studio art roots, courses in theological aesthetics and theology and contemporary art.

Peter’s scholarship includes a trilogy of monographs on Karl Rahner, Karl Rahner's Theological Aesthetics (2014) and Freedom Made Manifest: Rahner’s Fundamental Option and Theological Aesthetics (2019) and Love's Terrible Radiance: Rahner’s Theological Aesthetic of Enworlded Truth (forthcoming in 2027) and a co-edited volume (with Richard Lennan) of Rahner's spiritual writings: Karl Rahner: Spiritual Theology (2025).

Another scholarly venture is a multi-volume, co-authored project in systematic theology and Catholic social thought with Holy Cross colleague, Matthew Eggemeier, of which two volumes are published—Send Lazarus: Catholicism and the Crises of Neoliberalism (2020) and The Politics of Mercy: Catholic Life in an Era of Inequality, Racism, and Violence (2020)—with further volumes on postliberalism and American war to follow. Relatedly, Peter co-edited, with Matthew Eggemeier and Karen Guth, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval (Fordham University Press, 2022). 

Interdisciplinary inquiry carried Fritz’s scholarship into the psychological humanities, as he co-edited (with Mark Freeman) and contributed a chapter to a volume on higher education and anxiety: Educating Anxiety: Psychological, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives on Teaching and Learning (2026).

A final long-term scholarly project, which so far has yielded a peer-reviewed article and public-facing scholarship in America and Church Life Journal, is a monograph on Christology and contemporary art.

While Peter and his wife, Rochelle (a clinical psychologist), are native Midwesterners, they have made a new home in southern New England with their four children.