The Divinity School is pleased to share that Francesco P. Rahe, a fourth-year student in the College at the University of Chicago, has been selected as a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. He majors in both Religious Studies and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. While at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Francesco founded Critical Understandings of Liturgies and Traditions, or C.U.L.T., which is the university's first student organization devoted to fostering inter-faith discourse and overcoming religious intolerance. Francesco wrote his first novel at the age of nine and is actively working on three, one of which is a retelling of the Iliad. He is proficient in six languages to include Sanskrit, Persian, German, Biblical Hebrew, Latin and Arabic. He will pursue a master’s degree in classical Indian religions at Oxford University this fall and is particularly interested in translating Sanskrit texts. 

He is the 55th student from the University of Chicago to be named a Rhodes Scholar.

Rahe hopes to address interreligious divides through his studies. A Catholic himself, he believes that faiths become stronger when put in conversation with each other, and as an avid writer—Rahe is now working on his 13th novel—he feels that literature is one of the most powerful means of creating such conversations. He said that less than 3% of books published in the U.S. annually are translated—meaning that, from Rahe’s perspective, many of the most valuable interreligious conversations never happen in the first place. He hopes to change this by becoming a literary translator.

Read the University's announcement here.