Richard Freis died peacefully of natural causes on Sunday, November 20, two days before his 83 ^rd birthday. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 2 PM on Monday, December 5, 2022 at the Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle, 123 North West Street, Jackson.  Visitation is at 1 PM in the Parish Hall, and a reception will follow the service. All are welcomed to attend and celebrate Richard's life.

Richard was born on November 22, 1939, in New York City, the son of Willa Hussey Freis and Edward David Freis.  He spent his early childhood in the town of Winthrop, near Boston: he often recounted his delight at finding lobsters on the beach after a storm.  At the age of ten, he moved with his family to Washington, D.C. where his father was a prominent medical researcher, and settled in Silver Spring, Maryland. He had many childhood passions: cartooning, archaeology, and corresponding with his favorite authors.  His first publication was a neighborhood newsletter that often chronicled the lives of the dogs he loved.

Luckily for Richard, St. John's College was in Maryland; its intellectual integrity and reliance on reading only primary sources cultivated Richard's love for Plato in his freshman year. Throughout his college career, he happily read and discussed other great thinkers and writers from antiquity to the modern age.  While at St. John's, he was the founder of another publication, The Collegian, and he began his love affair with collecting a vast library of books.

Richard did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Classical Studies.  It was there he met his wife, Catherine Grace Ruggiero, a fellow graduate student; they practiced their Latin and Greek by writing notes to each other in those languages. He also practiced his English, by writing for the Daily Californian, the university newspaper.  During his years in California, he founded and edited AGÓN , A Journal of Classical Studies , and commissioned the first computer concordance of a Latin author in the days when computers took up multiple large rooms.  Students he taught at UC Berkeley and Mills College in Oakland remember him with fondness.

Richard chose to come to Millsaps College in 1975 to direct the innovative Heritage Program and to reestablish Classical Studies at the college. He was impressed with the moral courage and commitment of the faculty and their dedication to undergraduate education.  Richard nurtured and inspired a whole generation of young people with his intellect, his kindness, and his genuine delight in mentoring. Committed to the idea that learning and fun should be combined, he, with the help of his wife, held three-day Elizabethan Fairs and hosted innumerable Roman banquets. As the designer of the Leadership Seminars in the Humanities (now called Great Topics), he forged deep friendships with members of the Jackson community who enrolled in his seminars

Richard carved out time for his poetry, fiction, scholarship, and journalism. He loved theater and the arts.  He completed an opera libretto for composer Alva Henderson's Achilles. He wrote theater reviews for the Millsaps Players in the Purple and White , and he was the arts critic for the Jackson Daily News and other publications like Image and Opera News .  It was through his capacity as an arts critic that he met Thalia Mara and was thrilled by her idea of having an International Ballet Competition in Jackson. He saw it as a way of opening up the world to his students. One of the founders of the competition, he served as its first president and as as vice-president and staff writer in the second.  After the devastation of the 1979 Easter flood, he, along with other representatives of the first competition, convinced Mayor Dale Danks to proceed with the competition. When the competition was a success, and a New York City critic tried to move the competition there, he engineered a federal proclamation to declare Jackson the International Ballet Competition's permanent host city.

After ill health required him to retire early, Richard nonetheless remained active as a personal and organizational consultant; his work in integral and developmental frameworks was pioneering.  The training he undertook at the Shalem Institute in Washington D. C. to be a spiritual director was even closer to his heart. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he had completed a fourth college degree, a Master of Theological Studies, at Spring Hill College, and was a Benedictine Oblate with the Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. The hours spent in his study with his spiritual advisees and with a local group of spiritual directors who met weekly to refine their skills were a source of great contentment.

Another source of satisfaction in the last decades of his life was writing.  His libretto for a cantata by his friend Alva Henderson, From Greater Light , based on the story of Job, had its world premiere in 2008 in Los Angeles with the Pacific Symphony. His novel, Confession, was published in 2012. In that same year, as co-author with his wife and with his friend and colleague Greg Miller, he published Memoriae Matris Sacrum: to the Memory of my Mother, a Consecrated Gift, a translation of and commentary on the Latin and Greek poems of George Herbert in honor of his mother . And in 2016, he published his last completed work, a translation of George Herbert's sequence of forty Latin poems, Musae Responsoriae: The Muses in Response, one of the poetry sequences in George Herbert's Latin Verse, co-authored by Catherine Freis and Greg Miller.

Richard's marriage to the love of his life, Catherine, and his relationships with his children, grandchildren, students, and friends were always his priority – and the wellspring of his deepest happiness.  He showered love, kindness, and compassion on every person and every animal he met. Babies, children, and young people were his special joy.  His gentleness, his wisdom, his warmth, his enthusiastic pleasure in the delights of food (especially chocolate!) and celebration will be sorely missed.

Survivors include his wife Catherine Ruggiero Freis; his son and daughter-in-lawAdam and Fawn Crawford Freis and grandchildren Addison and Hailey Freis; his son-in-law Beau Daniel Hale and grandsons Matthew and Andrew Hale; his granddaughter Carolyn Huff Abrahamzon with her husband Ian Abrahamzon and great-grandchildren Evelyn and Thomas Abrahamzon; his great-granddaughter Kiley Rayne Magee; his great-grandson Rylan Daniel Garner; his niece Laura Bramhall Stearman with her husband Dan Stearman and their children and grandchildren; his niece Katheryn Bramhall Rodler with her husband Joseph Forsthoffer and daughter; his nephew David Janu Ezell; his nephew-in-law Tim Dunnington and his children; and loving cousins in Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas.  Our hope is that he is reunited in heaven with his daughter Kore Freis Hale, his granddaughter Katie Medlin, his sisters Susan Freis Falknor and Martha Bramhall, his niece Ama Dunnington, his cousin Rosanne Bonanno, and his parents Willa and Edward Freis.

Richard was such a great lover of animals that in lieu of flowers memorials may be made to National Wildlife Federation, https://www.nwf.org , or any organization designed to protect animals.