Leo D. Lefebure

He is Trustee Emeritus, Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions. He served as president of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies from 2019 to 2021, and is the Society's current past president.

Lefebure's early scholarship focused on Wisdom Christology (interpreting Jesus Christ in light of personified Wisdom in the Jewish tradition). He ended his first book, based on his dissertation, with suggestions on how the biblical wisdom tradition could inform interreligious relations. To explore this hypothesis in relation to Mahayana Buddhism, he published a book of meditations on the Christian scriptures in dialogue with Buddhist perspectives: Life Transformed. He also traveled to Kyoto Japan, through a junior scholars grant funded by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. Masao Abe guided him into Buddhist-Christian dialogue, which led to his 1993 book, The Buddha and the Christ. He then turned to the problem of religion and violence, studying the work of René Girard and publishing Revelation, the Religions, and Violence in 2000, which won the 2001 Pax Christi USA Book Award. He later wrote a Christian commentary on the wisdom sayings of the Buddha in dialogue with the biblical and later Christian wisdom traditions: The Path of Wisdom: A Christian Commentary on the Dhammapada, co-authored with Peter Feldmeier. His more recent works deal with the hermeneutics of religious classics and the history of relationships between the Catholic Church and other religions in the U.S.

Lefebure was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended Quigley South, a Catholic preparatory high school, and was managing editor of its school newspaper, the Profile. He earned a B.A. in Philosophy Summa Cum Laude from Niles College of Loyola University. His S.T.B. (Bachelor of Sacred Theology, 1976), S.T.L. (Licentiate of Sacred Theology) and M.Div. (1978), all Summa Cum Laude, were from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois. In 1987 he completed his Ph.D. in Christian Theology with Distinction at The University of Chicago, Toward a Contemporary Wisdom Christology: A Study of Karl Rahner and Norman Pittenger. Later he published it as his first book.