Gregory Keith Hillis

We bid farewell for now to Gregory K. Hillis, 49, husband, father, teacher, and friend. Greg passed away at home on October 8, 2024, after an eleven-month journey with cancer.

Born on May 1, 1975, to Jeanne Hughes and Bruce Hillis, Greg grew up in Rimbey, Alberta, and later moved to Kananaskis Country in the Rocky Mountains. As a high school graduate, he was thrilled to move to the city. In Calgary, while enrolled at Rocky Mountain College, he met his future spouse, Kim (Kauffeldt) Hillis, for whom he was profoundly and enthusiastically grateful throughout his life.

Greg's time in college sparked in him a love of theology, spirituality, and the history of Christianity. It was in this early stage of his education that he first discovered the writings of the American Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who quickly became a central figure in his life and work.

Newly married, Greg and Kim moved to Ontario, where Greg completed a second bachelor's degree at the University of Waterloo. Together they established lasting friendships in their new community, when they weren't traveling the world. Not long after Greg began graduate studies at McMaster University, he and Kim brought their first home and started a family. Isaac (2205) and Sam (2008) were both born at home and brought their new vitality into that tiny cottage.

Greg's work as a scholar was always deeply personal and led to his reception into the Catholic Church in 2007. Having completed his Ph.D. on Cyril of Alexandra, Greg accepted a tenure-track job in historical theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. Now a family of four, the Hillis crew journeyed south of the border on a new adventure. A few years later (2011), Leo arrived to complete the picture.

Greg was deeply passionate about his family, travel, and his work. He was a teacher at his core and his job at Bellarmine allowed him to live out this mission fully. In a time of growing religious uncertainty and disaffiliation, hundreds of students benefited intellectually and personally from Greg's approach to teaching. In Greg's classes students discovered a professor who cared about them and gave them confidence in their own ability to pursue lives of meaning and purpose. He was wise without being imposing and offered answers without implying that he was certain. He was both trustworthy and authentically human. Many former students, now established in careers themselves, stayed in touch with Greg until the end of his life.

Greg's traits as a teacher and as a person were meaningful and inspiring to his colleagues at Bellarmine and beyond. He wrote for many popular publications, taught deacon candidates around the country through St. Meinrad Seminary and engaged compassionately with a huge following on social media, through which he cultivated many genuine friendships.

For many people interested in religion today, Greg played an important role in articulating a form of Catholic commitment that is at once faithful, open, and inclusive. Greg's job at Bellarmine brought him a gift in this regard, as it gave him proximity to the Abbey of Gethsemani and the archive housed in Bellarmine's Thomas Merton Center. After hearing Pope Francis discuss Thomas Merton in his 2015 address to a joint session of congress, Greg was inspired to write Man of Dialogue: Thomas Merton's Catholic Vision, for which he won the 2022 Catholic Media Association's award in the category of biography. In Merton, Greg found a person whose commitment to Christ grew into a commitment to all, and in his book, Greg clarified beautifully that the deeper into faith we travel, the more open to the voice of God in others we become.

In 2023, Greg accepted a job as Executive Director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University, which seemed the perfect opportunity to continue his calling to illuminate the Church's gifts for a new and diverse generation of Catholics. His cancer diagnosis feels tragically untimely now, but the fact that Greg was grateful for the opportunity to work in a new direction and to know the deep kindness of a new community at a challenging moment. It was hard to get sick after moving, but it was heartening to move and discover still more good people in this world.

Knowing Greg on a personal level meant knowing that his most public gifts were honed at home. For Greg, any divine grace worth writing books about had to be a grace discoverable and practicable in relationships with those closer to him. As such, he was an unfailingly honest and supportive friend, a proud parent, and a passionately devoted spouse. He delighted in Isaac's musical and poetic gifts and attended concerts with him regularly. He relished Sam's love of baseball and shared his son's growing prowess as a pitcher with his friends. He marveled at Leo's spiritual curiosity and resilience in facing his own health challenges. And he loved Kim to a degree that made him seem perpetually surprised at his luck. Even near the end of his life, without much energy left for talking, he would tell friends of his gratitude for their love.

One of the gifts of the final challenging year of Greg's life was the opportunity it afforded him to reflect on regret. He concluded that while not a perfect human, any regrets he had were swallowed up by gratitude for the gifts of his life, both large and small. He encouraged friends who were in touch with him to meditate not on all things one might wish to do (no one gets to do everything anyway), but on doing gratefully whatever things we are given to do.

Greg will be missed deeply by Kim, Isaac, Sam, and Leo, who will carry him in their hearts in their own special ways. Besides his immediate family, he is survived by his father, Bruce, his sister, Kristy, his nephews Mason and Cole, his niece Tessa, his grandmother Betty, his mother-in-law Laura, his sister-in-law Jennifer, and many other aunts, uncles, and cousins. He is most definitely gone too soon.

In lieu of flowers, donations to Catholic Relief Services are welcome.

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