Hadiah Ritchey
Fall 2020 John Jay Fellow
Hometown: Somerset, KY
College: Hillsdale College
Degree: B.A. History
In the spring of 2020, Hadiah Ritchey graduated from Hillsdale College summa cum laude with a B.A. in History and departmental awards in both Religion and History. As a liberal arts devotee, Hadiah sometimes describes her interdisciplinary interests as “the history of the philosophy of religion,” particularly in the ethics and practices of the Church. By participating in Hillsdale’s Collegiate Scholars program, Hadiah used each of these disciplines in her senior thesis, which analyzed the overlap between the Anabaptist and neo-Anabaptist movements after 1943.
Outside the classroom, Hadiah tutored peers in Hillsdale’s Writing Center, served as a team leader at the Contact Center, and became one of the founding managers of a new campus coffee shop. Throughout college, Hadiah was an active member of the Federalist Society, Omicron Delta Kappa, Phi Alpha Theta, Phi Kappa Phi, and Hillsdale’s Anglican Student Fellowship. As a senior, Hadiah also served as the House Director for an upperclassmen’s women dormitory and as a senior class officer.
When not making lattes or planning class trivia nights, Hadiah’s interests have taken her to the Kentucky Supreme Court as an intern for Justice Daniel Venters and to Texas as a policy intern for First Liberty Institute where she drafted resources on the history of religious liberty in the United States. Most recently, Hadiah worked for the Barney Charter School Initiative where she developed curriculum for classical charter schools.
After participating in the John Jay Fellowship, Hadiah hopes to pursue a career in education or law as an advocate for holistic institutional structures and individual human flourishing. But most of all, Hadiah emphatically hopes to dedicate her life to the formation of intellectual and moral virtue in the tradition of the Church.