Henri J. M. Nouwen
Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer, and theologian whose work joined psychology, pastoral ministry, spirituality, social justice, and community. He was born on January 24, 1932, in Nijkerk, the Netherlands, the oldest of four children of Laurent J. M. Nouwen, a tax lawyer, and Maria Nouwen, who worked as a bookkeeper for her family’s business in Amersfoort. In a 20th-century church and academy often divided by discipline and role, Nouwen kept asking how faith touched the inner life of real people.
Nouwen studied at the Jesuit Aloysius College in The Hague, then spent a year at the minor seminary in Apeldoorn before entering six years of preparation for the priesthood at the major seminary in Rijsenburg. He was ordained a Catholic priest for the Archdiocese of Utrecht on July 21, 1957, by Bernardus Alfrink at St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Utrecht. Rather than continue in theology alone, he asked permission to study psychology, hoping to understand himself and those he counseled. From 1957 to 1964 he studied at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, where he sought to use psychology to explore the human side of faith.
His academic path was marked by both learning and tension. He was influenced by Han Fortmann, a Dutch psychologist of religion whose writing on action and contemplation in a busy world appeared later in Nouwen’s own concerns. His thesis work focused on Anton Boisen, the American minister credited with founding the clinical pastoral education movement, but it was not approved for lack of scientific analysis and clinical study. Nouwen completed his studies with a doctorandus degree, then spent two years as a fellow in the Religion and Psychiatry Program at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. There he was influenced by Gordon Allport and found that direct contact with patients mattered to him more than some forms of scientific and medical analysis.
Nouwen taught widely. He was a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame from 1966 to 1968, worked at the Amsterdam Joint Pastoral Institute, and taught psychology and spirituality at the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht. In 1971 he received a doctorandus degree in theology and became professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School, where he began to reach a broad readership through periodical writing, including in the National Catholic Reporter, and through books rooted in personal experience. His time at the Abbey of the Genesee led to Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery in 1976, and a later return after his mother’s death led to A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee.
After leaving Yale in 1981, Nouwen traveled for six months in South America, visiting Bolivia and Peru. In 1983 he became Professor of Divinity and Horace De Y. Lentz Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, a half-time appointment that allowed him to teach while working with a theological center in Latin America. He resigned in 1985, then spent nine months with the L’Arche community in France. His friendship with Jean Vanier deeply shaped him, and he later worked with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario.
Nouwen died on September 21, 1996. His thought was shaped by Anton Boisen, Thomas Merton, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Jean Vanier, and by the people he taught, counseled, prayed with, and lived among. His words still speak because they came from close contact with human need, not from theory alone. He wrote as a priest and teacher who kept returning to the same plain questions: how to live faithfully, how to care for one another, and how to find God in the ordinary pressures of life.
