Chris Tollefsen was 6 years old when his father, Dr. Olaf Tollefsen, began teaching at Saint Anselm. A legendary philosopher in dogged pursuit of the truth, Olaf provided Saint Anselm its very own Socrates for 15 years. Four months after Chris earned his bachelor's in philosophy at the college, Olaf died of brain cancer. His absence has been felt in hundreds of conversations ever since.

A generation later and a thousand miles down the road, Olaf's legacy continues. Chris Tollefsen is now a professor of moral philosophy at the University of South Carolina where his writings take on issues such as reproductive ethics and the moral problems of embryo creation and research. Chris traces the root of many of his arguments back to his freshman humanities seminar where the discussions were so animated that at one point, he recalls, someone threw a shoe at him.

"A good part of my professional research centers on a topic that was discussed very early in that seminar. In the philosopher unit, we read Plato's Euthyphro, in which Socrates asks whether the gods love the pious because it is pious, or whether it is pious because the gods love it. It is really a question about the objectivity of morality; is the good good because we desire it, or do we desire it because it is good? A lot of my work is about defending some conception of moral objectivity and understanding what that implies."

Chris and his wife Laurie '89 both received Ph.Ds in philosophy at Emory University, and after a year teaching in Ghana settled in South Carolina in 1997 where they are raising five children. And, yes, the oldest son's name is Olaf.