Dr. Robert O’Connor ’79 celebrates the hard questions. “Do you really believe in evolution?” asked a student sitting across from the associate professor of philosophy during office hours. “As a first-semester freshman who had grown up with a different view, he found it hard to believe that a Wheaton professor was open to even the possibility of the evolutionary account,” says O’Connor, who ultimately considers himself agnostic as to whether evolution can fully account for the origin of human beings.

And yet, in the classroom, the beloved philosophy professor hopes to foster an atmosphere of serious inquiry. “I think a lot of students find in philosophy a kind of freedom and congeniality for asking questions,” O’Connor says. “You have the luxury to step back and think very carefully through the issues that you will confront later in life.”

For O’Connor, studying philosophy is like taking a “quest” to understand one’s faith commitments and to prepare for coming challenges.

This is something he knows from experience. O’Connor and his wife lost their oldest daughter, Anna ’07, M.A. ’11, to cancer at the age of 26. Enduring that terrible loss “simply affirmed my sense of calling in philosophy because of the power and freedom that she had,” says O’Connor. “Her experience convinced me that there’s more to this life than meets the eye.”