Matustik, Martin Beck

Born in Slovakia in 1957, Martin Beck Matu tik grew up in Prague behind the communist Iron Curtain. A firsthand witness of the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Matu tik was raised in an atheistic home by communist parents until he was orphaned at the age of fourteen. Fleeing Prague in 1977 at the age of nineteen, he spent five years in training with California Jesuits, studied with Jurgen Habermas in Frankfurt a/M, and returned to Prague after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Matu tik received his PhD from Fordham University in 1991 and went on to teach in Purdue University's philo...