Don J Briel

Early life and education

The second of three children, Briel was born in Ventura, California, to Carl and Francis Irene (Dages) Briel. His father worked as a manager for Sears Roebuck and his mother held various positions as an executive secretary. Briel grew up with his sister, Jean Marie (b. 1944). Not long after Briel’s birth, his father was transferred to various stores throughout southern California and the family moved accordingly until settling for some time in Reno, NV, where Briel graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School in 1961 and Bishop Manogue Catholic High School in the spring of 1965. Briel enrolled in the University of Notre Dame the same year and completed a Bachelor of Arts in History in 1969, having studied under Frank O’Malley. He studied Literature at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and earned a Licentiate (1976) and Doctorate (1980) in Catholic Theology from the University of Strasbourg in France. His scholarly work focused on the work of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who is much associated with a well-known text on higher education, The Idea of a University. His dissertation was entitled, Isaac Williams and Newman: The Oxford Movement Controversy of 1838-1841.

Career in Academia

After brief teaching stints at the University of San Francisco and St. Mary of the Plains, Briel was hired by the University of St. Thomas in 1981. He was Chair of the Theology Department from 1990 to 1999, the first non-clergyman to hold the position, and served for a time as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In 1996 the students of the University of Saint Thomas elected him the Aquinas Scholars Honor Society Professor of the Year.

In 1993, as an initiative for the renewal of Catholic higher education and a reengagement of the whole of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Briel and a few of his colleagues founded the Center for Catholic Studies. It was the first such program in the country and graduated its first students in 1995. Over the course of the next twenty years, that project went from being a small interdisciplinary program, to a minor, then to a major, then to a department within the College of Arts and Sciences, with some three hundred undergraduate majors and minors and seventy-five Master’s students.

Briel founded Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, and engineered the establishment of three institutes connected to the Center for Catholic Studies: the John A Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought, Murphy Institute for Law and Public Policy, and the Habiger Institute for Catholic Leadership.

In 1998 Briel collaborated with the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas to launch a program for students in Rome, Italy, and two years later the Bernardi Campus of the University of St. Thomas was acquired and dedicated.

Since the founding of the first Catholic Studies program by Briel in 1993, nearly one hundred programs in Catholic Studies have been established at colleges and universities in the United States and other countries. Briel has consulted with universities in the Philippines, Cameroon, Canada, Italy, Peru, and Spain. The second largest of these programs, after the program at St. Thomas, is at the University of Mary, directed by Matthew Gerlach, a 1997 alumnus of the St. Thomas program.

Professional Memberships

University of Mary

In August 2014, at an academic conference entitled “Twenty Years of Catholic Studies,” the University of Mary conferred an honorary doctorate upon Briel in recognition of his contributions to Catholic higher education and announced that Briel had been appointed as the first occupant of the Blessed John Henry Newman Chair of Liberal Arts.