Chris L. Firestone

Chicago, Hong Kong, Edinburgh

Chris Firestone grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the son of a tax preparer, in a neighborhood rough enough that his parents pulled him out of the local school and put him in a Lutheran one. He played basketball well enough to take it to Hong Kong, where a pickup game against the People's Liberation Army and a short film called So, This is Philosophy? were early signs of a life that would refuse to stay inside one lane.

He studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Illinois, took a master's in Christian Thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and earned his PhD at the University of Edinburgh with a dissertation on Kant's rational foundations for religious faith.

Kant

Kant became the thinker he chose to sit under. Where most readers found in Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason a confused attempt to reduce Christianity to ethics, Firestone found a coherent and surprisingly affirmative account of rational religious faith. Making that case took seven years and a co-author, his former student Nathan Jacobs. In Defense of Kant's Religion (Indiana University Press, 2008) was called 'one of the best, if not the best' English books on Kant's philosophy of religion, drew an American Academy of Religion critics' session, and became the anchor of what is now called the affirmative or 'new wave' reading of Kant.

Trinity

For twenty-five years he taught philosophy at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, where he chaired the department, directed the Humanities Division, grew the philosophy major to forty students, and co-founded the Trinity Debates, a two-decade series that brought figures like Albert Mohler, Jim Wallis, and Douglas Moo to campus to argue in public. He wrote the six-hundred-thousand-dollar Lilly Endowment grant that created the 360 Summer Leadership Institute for high-school students and taught it for eight summers. He won Trinity's Regent's Prize twice. Along the way he edited three more volumes on Kant and the persistence of the sacred in modern thought, one of which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, wrote a sole-authored monograph on Kant and theology, co-wrote and produced a feature comedy called Killing Poe (2016), and, with Alex Pierce, wrote a short book on why friendship matters.

Turning Point and Champion

In 2023 a phone call from Charlie Kirk changed the shape of his career. Kirk wanted to know why a Kant scholar would work with Turning Point USA. Firestone's answer, that the university had retreated into itself and that someone had to take the great tradition back out to young people, led him to design the curriculum for the Turning Point Education Prep Year and, in 2024, to move to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to help build Champion Christian College. He is now its Vice President of Academic Excellence and Strategic Partnerships, teaches Bible and philosophy, and directs the Great Writings Honors Program. He also serves on the faculty of Profer, the credentialing platform founded by Nathan Jacobs.

The Firestone Files

The Firestone Files began in September 2025 as a set of letters to grandchildren who do not exist yet. Fifty-plus episodes later it has become a weekly public classroom: a five-part lecture series on Descartes, a six-part series on dreams, a running argument about what philosophy is, interviews with his own children and with friends like Eric Capaci and Rick Green, field reports from protests and conventions, and a three-part crossover with Nathan Jacobs on Orthodoxy, Evangelicalism, and the lie about modern philosophy.

Off the clock

He and his wife Beth have five adult children. He rides mountain bikes, plays chess, collects Lego sets and baseball cards, and holds a ministry license in the Evangelical Free Church of America, under which he conducts weddings, baptisms, and funerals.