Father Theodore (Ted) Vitali: A man of the cloth. Head of the Department of Philosophy. Hunter of bears.

Vitali grew up hunting, and said he “truly loves the outdoors.”

A self-proclaimed vital part of his life, Vitali said that he feels a deep, spiritual connection with nature.

While hunting, Vitali recalls two especially spiritual experiences, and describes them in reverential detail:

“This bear knew I was there, he spotted me; I don’t know how.

“I was camouflaged up to my nose, but he probably got a whiff of me, smelled me and he came out and looked at me, way across a huge walk-a huge field, actually-a cut down field, and he looked at me, and went back into the bush.
‘
I kept my distance into the evening, it was almost dark, and he came out four or five times … a little further each time. [It] kept watching me, cautiously.

‘I had him in my sights now, and he never gave me the shot … and then at about a quarter to 10 at night-it was just about dark-he walked right in front of me, right in front of me … and I shot him and killed him instantly.

‘I remember the bond that I felt with him, that he gave me his life.”

Vitali’s second, profound hunting experience involves a “majestic wolf that got away.”

“I didn’t want him to go away, … I wanted to just look at him,” Vitali said.

“He had enough of me, and off he went into the bushes and I never saw him again. It was an exhilarating experience, it was not fear, not an experience of fear. I felt a bond to that wolf, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.”

After writing a paper on hunting ethics, Vitali was invited to join the Boone and Crockett Club, a hunting society founded by Theodore Roosevelt.

At a club conference, Vitali delivered his paper as a speech.

He said that he joined the club “basically by accident,” after members from the club heard him speak.

Once he was accepted, he said that he became a key person in shaping the debate over hunting ethics.

“My love for philosophy and hunting comes together in that area,” Vitali said.

As the head of Saint Louis University’s Department of Philosophy, Vitali has seen the department’s focus switch from philosophical developments of the past to a program that is skilled at applying those past developments to modern issues.

This ties in with SLU’s Jesuit mission, he said, as the ideas and theories of the ancients are used as background for arguing issues of the present.

Vitali is proud of his department, one that is peer-reviewed at the same level of quality as Oxford University.

But Vitali insists that it is not due to his leadership alone, and that without his fantastic faculty, the department would not be what it is today.