It was with a heavy heart that we at America received the news on Tuesday morning that Greg Hillis had died of complications from cancer. A longtime contributor to America and a friend to many staffers, Greg had written several times for us over the past year about his diagnosis and treatment. With grace and unflinching honesty, he wrote about how he was affected by his terminal diagnosis—and how that struggle changed his own outlook on life and faith.
Born in Alberta, Canada, Greg earned his doctorate in theology from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Raised Protestant, he entered the Catholic Church during graduate studies in 2007. He wrote frequently on the theology of Cyril of Alexandria, including an introduction to a translation of Cyril’s Glaphyra. His academic scholarship in recent years had focused on the life and thought of Thomas Merton, with whom he felt a strong kinship. In addition to America, he wrote regularly for other journals, including Commonweal.
After 15 years teaching at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky., Greg became the executive director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., in June of 2023. His book Man of Dialogue: Thomas Merton’s Catholic Vision, was published in 2021 and earned a first place award from the Catholic Media Association for biography.
Greg’s writings for America covered a wide range of issues, ranging from liturgy to contemplative religious life to R.C.I.A. to parenting to his beloved baseball (my own friendship with Greg began at a theology conference a decade ago, but it was over baseball that we truly bonded). And then of course there was Merton, whose work Greg first began reading in 1998. A year ago this month, he wrote an essay for America on how Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain had radically changed his life during a time of personal and vocational crisis.
“Misery loves company,” he wrote in that essay. “Suffering is isolating, so it can be comforting to have another person who has been through a similar experience accompany us. And this is precisely what Thomas Merton did for me in those days—he accompanied me. His story became intertwined with mine, and he immediately became a companion, even a friend.”
In November of last year, Greg was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a form of bile duct cancer, and was given a window of two to five years to live. In an essay for America on how reading Julian of Norwich helped him deal with the diagnosis, he wrote with frank honesty about the reality of being a theology professor who often dealt with questions of theodicy and suffering who was now facing those questions head-on:
It is jarring to sit in a fluorescent-lit room and be told you have cancer. I instantly ceased being a healthy middle-aged person who had never really suffered to being someone whose entire existence was now identified and threatened by a disease we all fear. But it was similarly jarring to hear a priest pray that I might “find hope in suffering,” like having cancer was something I could or should acknowledge as a good thing.
Struggling with his own answers, Greg related the experience of his young son asking if it was O.K. to be angry at God. Drawing on Julian of Norwich’s conviction that Christ is suffering with us during every experience of pain and loss, he wrote:
I may not have a theologically satisfying answer to why suffering occurs (in fact, I’ve yet to encounter a truly satisfying answer), but the Incarnation teaches us that God enters into our suffering and accompanies us as a parent accompanies and suffers alongside a suffering child. And it is this message that I communicated to my 12-year-old. Anger with God in the face of suffering makes sense if we think of God as the cause of that suffering or if we perceive God to look upon our suffering with a kindly, but impotent, benevolence. But if we come to understand that God suffers alongside us as one who truly knows what it means to suffer, our anger morphs into love and our suffering mysteriously becomes a means of transformation.
That is treading perilously close to notions of God’s mutability, something Greg noted himself was a notion not many theologians would be comfortable with—but “I take most comfort right now in a God who suffered profoundly in Jesus Christ and, in some mysterious way, now suffers alongside me and alongside all who suffer.”
In April of 2024, Greg wrote of a trip he took to Rome after his cancer treatment had begun, and how the many relics of saints he encountered on that trip gave him new insights into what he and his family were undergoing. During that trip, he visited a church that held the remains of St. Stephen of Sinai, a sixth-century hermit. “I fell in love with relics that day,” he wrote.
“Our theology of relics tells us something beautiful and profound not only about God but about what we believe about materiality itself,” he wrote. Visiting the body of St. John XXIII in St. Peter’s Basilica gave him further insight into the importance of our material bodies—in all their messiness and frailty.
“I didn’t gaze upon and pray before the body of Pope St. John XXIII to contemplate my own mortality, suffering as I am from the same disease that took his life, though I could not but think about my own bodily demise in that moment,” Greg remembered. “Rather, I saw in Pope John the truth that despite the pope’s infirmities (as well as my own), God is manifest in our embodiedness and even in our illness and suffering, not in opposition to it.”
God, he wrote, is perhaps experienced most profoundly in our suffering:
As I knelt before the body of Pope John, I realized that God is not made manifest only in what we consider beautiful and good. God is also seen and experienced in suffering, in death, in the fragments of saints found all throughout our churches, in the corpse of a saintly old man who called the Second Vatican Council, and even in my own body, afflicted as it is.
It is an irony—though an appropriate one—that the final essay Greg wrote for America, was ostensibly not about theology at all, but about baseball. After the news of the retirement of Ángel Hernández, widely considered the worst umpire in baseball, Greg reflected on the value of showing one another mercy. “I think Ángel Hernández was not particularly good at being an umpire. But I know for a fact that I would perform even worse,” he wrote. “Moreover, can we not think of times in our work or family lives—as well as in our spiritual lives—when we have made mistakes on a colossal scale? I can, and I thank God that my errors in judgment and action were not on display for the world to see. Instead, I thank God for the mercy shown to me by those affected by my errors.”
“For us diehard baseball fans, Ángel Hernández's retirement should not be a moment to revisit his past errors and sneer.” he wrote. “Instead, it is a chance to express mercy in a world that, as Pope Francis reminds us, is in dire need of it.”
In August of this year, Greg discovered his cancer was spreading rapidly. “My oncologists are no longer talking in terms of years or even decades. We are all talking about months,” he wrote on X. “With my time I have remaining, I will pray and prepare.”
Greg died on the morning of Oct. 8. He is survived by his wife Kim and three sons, and leaves behind a large and diverse community of family and friends all over the world. For so many of us, he was a true friend in the Lord.
