Photo: Fr. Jeff Putthoff (left) at a Jesuit gathering in St. Louis on Labor Day, visiting with friends including Fr. John Craig (right)

In diminished circumstances, Jesuit connects to 'a God of hope'

By Tom Roberts, from the National Catholic Reporter

CAMDEN,NJ | When Jeff Putthoff comes into a room, the equilibrium shifts, things move toward him. He is a huge presence with a booming voice and a big laugh.

If the Jesuits had a heavy-weight division, he'd be in it. He has a personality to match his size, enormous energy, ambitious dreams and ideas that spill out so rapidly and with such enthusiasm that even when he's sitting still he seems to be in constant motion.

You've seen it before -it's the same gene pool, perhaps, as that oft he hard-driving CEO who commands corporate legions or the kid-entrepreneur who's yanking down seven fIgures. They possess that combination of self-assurance and willingness to disassemble old presumptions that leads to new insights and bold new ways of doing things.

But perhaps it's Putthoff's questions--they, too, are outsized---that really set him apart. They run to such very un-CEO-like queries as "How do we best know God?" They fuel an entrepreneurial spirit, which appears considerable, that is at the service of youth who are trying to manufacture different endings than expected to lives that begin in some of the most wretched and despair-riddled circumstances in the country.

Read the rest of the story on the National Catholic Reporter web page