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I was born in 1939 and grew up on the northwest side of Chicago, where i attended St. Edward's Grammar School from 1949 till 1953 and then Fenwick High School in Oak Park IL, where I was taught by Dominicans. As a youth I was active in the Scouting Movement and held various offices at the local and regional levels. After graduating from Fenwick, I studied liberal arts for two years at Loras College in Dubuque IA before joining the Dominican Order in 1959. I studied Philosophy and Theology at the Aquinas Institute in River Forest, IL, and Dubuque, IA, earning an M.A. in each field, with dissertations on "The Notion of perfect society in Aristotle and Aquinas" (1963) and "The psychology of natural and supernatural knowledge according to St. Thomas Aquinas" (1967). In 1967, I was sent by the Dominicans to Tübingen, Germany, to do a doctorate in ecclesiology under Hans Küng; I completed it in 1974 with a dissertation on "An American vision of the Church : the Church in American Protestant theology; 1937 - 1967 (pub. 1976). A personal crisis in 1971, provoked by the growing tensions between the liberal and conservative factions in the Church in the wake of the Infallibility Debate, led me to seek a leave of absence from the Dominican Order in 1972. I left the Order definitively in 1976, obtaining a full dispensation from Rome; nevertheless I continue to maintain fraternal relations with my former Dominican confreres. In 1976, I married Erika née Glück a Swabian woman, who had studied in Paris and worked in England and Switzerland. She was training kindergarten-teachers in Tübingen, when I met her. A year later, our son Emanuel was born, two years later our daughter Johanna. In 1977 we bought our house in Gomaringen, some 10 km. from Tübingen. Meanwhile I had found work as a maker of historical maps of the Byzantine Empire in the Near East for the TAVO (Tübingen Atlas of the Near East). In 1979, I entered employment as a documentalist for theology and the religious sciences in the THEODOK Project of the Tübingen University Library; when that project was abruptly ended in 1981, I stayed on at the Library as a librarian, working quarter-time on the theological documentation project of Prof. Küng's Institute of Ecumenical Research. Since retirement from the Library in 2004, I have continued to work with Prof. Küng's Global Ethic Foundation [http://www.weltethos.org/dat-english/index.h tm] and the Institute of Ecumenical Research http://www.kath-theol.uni-tuebingen.de/Lehrst uehle/institut_fuer_oekumenische_forschung/in dex.html] now under Prof. Hilberath. I am a major contributors to the German-English-German Section of the Dict.cc Project [http://www.dict.cc/?l=e], an Internet translator's dictionary for a wide spectrum of languages. I continue to write on theological and philosophical topics, concentrating especially on issues in the psychology and sociology of cognition and the relationships of philosophy (and theology) to the natural and social sciences in the light of the version of Aristotelian Thomism that I learned from Benedict Ashley and James A Weisheipl and other representatives of the so-called "River Forest School". Some of my publications are listed at http://person.yasni.de/thomas-riplinger-20505 9.htm.
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