N.B. The following was last updated in November 2003....
John Kelleher is a husband, and has been a "Mr. Mom" to his family's two children since they were born. He lectors at daily Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, two blocks from his house. He graduated magna cum laude in the Honors Program from Saint Louis University, where he received his initial training in Sacred Scripture, philosophy, and theology. He received an M.A. in music from the University of California, San Diego, where his master's thesis was in a scientific field, a music-related branch of perceptual psychology. The thesis, and his ardent interest in advanced music composition, began a life-long engagement with the nature of perception, memory, and comprehension, which over the years broadened to questions related to epistemology, hermeneutics, theology of the body, and the nature of rationality, and the implications of all of these for Catholic education at all levels from kindergarten through college.
By age 23 he was a graduate student, knew that he was impelled to compose modern music at the intersection of electronics, computers, and cognitive science and to think academic and scientific thoughts of no earthly use, and had come to understand that life was simple. If you have a strong inner need to spend a good part of your adult life connecting moderately-pitched noise bands into perceptual units similar to melodies, that is not the sort of thing you can reasonably expect people to pay you to do, unless you are an academic.
So, one possible solution was to aspire to be one of several hundred applicants for the position of non-tenured assistant professor of nothing much at East Jesus Community College, northern South Dakota, in order to be able to teach the unteachable, wear tweed suits, and use words like 'multifarious' at faculty meetings. The other alternative was to work, out of a deep inner need, on esoteric and difficult artistic and intellectual projects that were high risk and low monetary reward, gambling that a few of these projects might one day prove to be valuable to others, while scraping together an honest living by doing something people actually wanted, such as playing liturgical music and directing choirs in Catholic parishes. Whereupon, observing of himself, that his talent was modest, even if not entirely lacking, and that he displayed a notable lack of zest for prolonged participation in any of the current institutional embodiments of the life of the mind, the correct alternative became obvious....
It must be conceded that "Mr. Mom" was initially not an obvious part of this career path, but it became one when he married a beautiful, holy woman with a real job. So along with raising his children, he has continued to compose music his mother doesn't understand, donated thousands of volunteer hours to the successful curricular reform of his daughters' Cambridge public school, and just thought about stuff....
The Old Testament in the Heart of the Catholic Church was initially written for the education of his two daughters, but John's wife convinced him that OTHCC might have a broader usefulness. And John, like any sensible husband, listens to his wife.