People

Jonathan J. Sanford, Ph.D., is the 10th president of the University of Dallas. President Sanford, who previously served as provost and dean of UD’s undergraduate college, holds a doctorate in philosophy and is an accomplished scholar. Sanford has published widely on philosophical figures and topics, especially in foundational questions in moral philosophy, as evidenced in Before Virtue: Assessing Contemporary Virtue Ethics (The Catholic University of America Press, 2015 (paperback, 2019)). As president, he is focused on leading the implementation of the university’s strategic plan by building on the university’s reputation for academic rigor, its commitment to classical Western tradition, and its faithful Catholic identity. 

Sanford is a trustee of the Hildebrand Project, a member of the Dallas chapter of Legatus, a fellow of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, and  and is active in several other professional and academic organizations. 

University of Dallas

President & Professor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Ethics, Catholic Higher Education, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Metaphysics, Virtue Theory

James Beauregard PhD is a Lecturer in the Psy.D. and Ed.D. programs at Rivier University, Nashua, New Hampshire, USA where he teachers Biological Bases of Behavior, Neuropsychology, Educational Neuroscience and Aging. His research interests are in the fields of neuroethics and personalist philosophy, including the intersection of these two areas as they impact our understandings of personhood. He is a member of the International Neuroethics Society, where he serves as a neuroethics expert, the Spanish Personalist Association and the International Conference on Persons (where he serves on the board of directors). His recent publications include Philosophical Neuroethics: A Personalist Approach, Vol. 1, Foundations and the forthcoming Philosophical Neuroethics, Vol. 2: Practical Neuroethics. He is currently working on an educational project in conjunction with a Catholic high school to bring the ethical thought of Dietrich von Hildebrand, as well as other personalist philosophers, into the high school curriculum through writing of a high school Catholic Ethics text and instructional materials. He is also editor of the forthcoming Internet Encyclopedia of Personalism, an online, open access peer-reviewed resource on personalist thought to be launched in 2021. His interest in personalist thought was sparked early in his college days when he first read Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II’s The Acting Person and Redemptor Hominis.

Rivier University

Lecturer, Psy.D. and Ed.D. Programs

Research Areas:

Contemporary European personalist thought, neuroethics, bioethics, personalist psychology, and the ethical vision of Dietrich von Hildebrand

Peter J. Colosi is associate professor of philosophy at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, before that having taught at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia and at the Austrian Program of Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned his BS in mathematics from Franciscan University, an MA in Franciscan Studies from St. Bonaventure University, and his MPhil and PhD from The International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein. Dr. Colosi has published articles, book chapters and pieces in online outlets in areas including philosophical personalism, medical ethics, Catholic social and moral teaching, and Franciscan studies, and is a contributing editor of the Linacre Quarterly. He is co-founder and one of the main organizers of the Theology of the Body International Symposia, of which there have been five thus far, in Austria, Ireland, England, Portugal and Holland. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of and lecturer at the Medical Student and Resident Boot Camp of the Catholic Medical Association which occurs every June and began in 2013, and he is occasionally interviewed on Doctor, Doctor, the official radio program of the Catholic Medical Association, and on Relevant Radio.

Salve Regina University

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

The Body/Soul Question; Philosophical Personalism; Catholic Medical Ethics; Catholic Social and Moral Teaching

Cajthaml studied philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague from 1991-1993. He went on to study philosophy and psychology at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Lichtenstein (IAP). In 2000, he earned his PhD in philosophy at the IAP with the dissertation Kritik des Relativismus. In 2000-2007 he worked as assistant-professor at the IAP. He is a full professor and the Head of the Department of Philosophy and Patrology at the Sts Cyril and Methodius Faculty of Theology of Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Palacký University Olomouc

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Philosophical Ethics; Intellectual and Spiritual Roots of European Culture; Value Theory

Mario Delucchi is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Dallas, where he teaches ethics and metaphysics. He likes to cast his net across philosophical paradigms, seeking ways to overcome impasses between schools and traditions (without compromising eternal verities and values.) Nevertheless, his penchant for exploring concrete human themes through the phenomenological method draws him especially to phenomenological, existentialist, and personalist thought. Here, Dietrich von Hildebrand has been a long-time companion. Mario strives to resist rigid partitions between disciplines in order to emphasize the mutually reinforcing relationship between metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, for the sake of that ancient trinity: the true, good, and beautiful. He also never ceases to find fulfillment in teaching, and midwifing the philosophical insights of undergraduates has proven to be a constant source of inspiration. A convert in two senses, he was introduced many years ago to Catholicism, through the sublime beauty of its music and architecture, by a close friend and mentor who also taught him how to see and think phenomenologically. For Mario, faith, reason, and a sense for the beautiful thrive together, ever since they awoke together many years ago. He currently resides with his wife Lauren in Bedford Texas.

University of Dallas

Doctoral Candidate and Philosophy Professor

Research Areas:

Personalism (broadly construed), phenomenology (especially the Munich school), existentialist thought, philosophical aesthetics, Maurice Blondel, Robert Spaemann, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.

Dr. Maria Fedoryka lectures and publishes in both academic and popular fora in the field of the philosophy of love, examining issues spanning from the centrality of love in the being of God, to its role at the center of creation, to its meaning for marriage, family, and sexuality. Having been captivated by the writings of Dietrich von Hildebrand as a teenager and deeply drawn to his phenomenological and personalist philosophy, she pursued her studies under Josef Seifert and John Crosby at the International Academy of Philosophy. Among her scholarly writings are an analysis of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s philosophy of marital intimacy and procreation titled Finis superabundant Operis: Refining an Ancient Cause for Understanding the Spousal Act in the ACPQ, and “‘God is Love’”: Personal Plurality as the Completion of Aristotle’s Notion of Substance and Love as the Absolute Ground of the Divine Being” in the Proceedings of the ACPA. Among her popular publications are the booklet The Special Gift of Women for God, the Family and the World published by the Catholic Truth Society in England. She is currently working on an article comparing Hildebrand’s and Aquinas’s philosophy of affectivity, as well as an article on Hildebrand’s theory of motivation as the key to understanding deliberate moral wrongdoing.

Ave Maria University

Associate Professor

Research Areas:

Philosophy of Love

Tom is the manager of Campus Ministry/Chaplaincy, lecturer, and PhD candidate in the School of Philosophy & Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Prior to his work in Campus Ministry/Chaplaincy, he worked as a classroom teacher and faculty head of Religious Education in Catholic secondary schools in Western Australia.

He holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in education, and a Graduate Certificate in Liberal Arts from the University of Notre Dame Australia. Tom also holds a Masters of Theological Studies (MTS) from The John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies in Melbourne, Australia.

Tom is also the managing editor of Macrina Magazine, and the president and co-founder of The Christopher Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture (Inc.), a not-for-profit association, founded to organise and promote cultural & philosophic activities that recognise the spiritual, as well as the material, element in our nature & in society more broadly.

Tom and his wife Elizabeth have three children live in Perth Western Australia.

The University of Notre Dame Australia

Lecturer, School of Philosophy & Theology; Manager, Chaplaincy

Research Areas:

Theological anthropology, Natural Law, Faith and Culture, Theological critiques of liberalism, Catholic education

Elisa Grimi is Executive Director of the European Society for Moral Philosophy and the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Philosophical News. On May 30, 2014, she received the Paolo Michele Erede Foundation First Prize with a work on “Politics and Network”. She has studied and worked at various universities throughout the world, in countries including Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, England, France, and the United States. She is the author of numerous publications.

The European Society for Moral Philosophy

Executive Director

Research Areas:

Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Analytic Philosophy

Derek S. Jeffreys is a professor of Humanities, Religion and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. He did both his B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He has written books on St. John Paul II, ethics and torture and ethics and solitary confinement. His most recent book is America’s Jails: The Search for Human Dignity in An Age of Mass Incarceration. Jeffreys teaches courses on love, Thomas Aquinas, ethics, ethics and punishment, evil, Dante, Buddhism, and other topics. For more than a decade he has been involved in jail and prison education, giving volunteer religion and philosophy lectures to inmates in Wisconsin’s jails and prisons. He is married and proud father of twin boys.

University of Wisconsin, Green Bay

Professor

Research Areas:

Personalism, Personalism and Violence, Personalism and Incarceration

Dr Lamb recently joined the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews as a Lecturer in Theology and the Arts, teaching many of the courses run out of the School’s Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts. Prior to her move to the ancient kingdom of Fife, she was an inaugural Gilson Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of St. Michael’s College, within the University of Toronto. She also lectured at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Barry’s Bay (Ontario).

She has recently published on Christina Rossetti, George MacDonald, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. She is currently completing a book, under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press, on the theological and aesthetic implications of boredom, with special emphasis on the Victorian period and the early twentieth century. She is currently co-editing a special issue with Religion and Literature on John Henry Cardinal Newman, to commemorate his recent canonisation, and is a collaborator on the Tree of Tales Exhibition on Tolkien, a partnership between the University of St Andrews and the Rimini Meeting.

Dr Lamb teaches on a wide range of subjects, from The Book of Genesis to Black Mirror, and recently co-designed and co-taught a new course on The Imagination in Theology and Science at the University of St. Andrews. She teaches graduate courses on Practical Criticism, Christian Doctrine and the Arts, and Theology and the Arts, with emphasis on Dietrich von Hildebrand, among others.

She has taught and lectured on both sides of the Atlantic, in the States, Canada, Rome, England, and Scotland. She recently appeared on BBC One’s Reflections at the Quay, contributed to the Narnia Lenten Lecture Series at the McGrath Institute for Church Life (University of Notre Dame), and frequently writes for public-facing journals such as Convivium: Faith in Our Common Life, The Catholic Herald, Transpositions, and The Scottish Catholic Observer, among others.

University of St. Andrews, School of Divinity

Lecturer in Theology, Imagination and the Arts

Research Areas:

Religion and Literature; Aesthetics; Victorian and Modernist Studies; Christian Personalism; Practical Criticism

Robert is an Associate Professor of Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he teaches philosophy and theology, an associate member of faculty of the International Theological Institute and the Maryvale Institute, an Associated Scholar of the Hildebrand Project, and a founding member of the Aquinas Institute of Ireland, for which he currently holds the position of secretary. Robert was educated at the National University of Ireland Galway, where he studied physics and applied science, Maynooth University and St. Patrick’s College, where he studied philosophy and theological studies, the International Theological Institute, where he received a master’s degree in the theology of marriage and family, and Liverpool Hope University, where he completed a doctorate of philosophy detailing Edith Stein’s engagement with the thought of Thomas Aquinas in her mature philosophy of the human person. Robert is originally from Galway, Ireland.

Franciscan University of Steubenville

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Metaphysics, Personalism, Edith Stein, Thomas Aquinas (Thomism)

Margarita Mooney is currently an Associate Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder and executive director of Scala Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to reinvigorating classical liberal arts education and preserving the ideas and practices necessary to maintain a free society. Scala’s conferences, colloquia, reading groups, dinner seminars and travel events emphasize hospitality and friendship, aiming to help students connect their intellectual development with character formation and generating transformative educational experiences and authentic friendships. Begun in 2016, Scala has become a movement to transform education and has built networks with students, educators and partner organizations in various locations around the world.

As a woman whose work lies at the intersection of the social sciences with philosophy and theology, she excels at encouraging students, readers, listeners and audiences to think about important questions in culture, education and faith in new and different ways. She is a frequent speaker to women’s organizations, think tanks, schools, church groups and a variety of other nonprofits as well as businesses about faith and values. In addition to her scholarly books and articles, she has written for publications that reach wide audiences both inside and outside academia such as Real Clear Policy, Scientific American, Public Discourse, Church Life Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is a passionate keynote speaker on higher education, culture and Christianity at venues including Yale University, Harvard Law School, Columbia University, Duke University, Pepperdine and the Catholic University of America. Her writing and research have been widely cited and praised, including by David Brooks in The New York Times, and Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor-at-large of National Review, who has written that “the world needs more Margarita Mooney.” She has been interviewed by the Acton Institute, Duke Divinity School, and the talk show host Eric Metaxas.

Dr. Mooney received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. She has also been on the faculty of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Yale University.

Princeton Theological Seminary

Associate Professor of Practical Theology

Research Areas:

Resilience, Philosophy of Social Science, Education, Intentional Communities

Beth. A. Rath is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Borromeo Seminary in Cleveland, OH. Her first formal experience with philosophy was as a teenager. She heard a lecture on Descartes, and from there she was intrigued by the sorts of questions philosophers ask. Beth went on to study philosophy and theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she first encountered the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and personalism. There she heard a lecture by Alice von Hildebrand that changed the trajectory of her life and inspired her to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. She completed her doctorate in philosophy at Saint Louis University, with an emphasis on the nature of the human person, moral philosophy, and themes at the intersection of philosophy and theology. At Borromeo, Beth teaches a wide variety of philosophy courses to both seminarians and lay students, and she co-teaches Tolle Lege, a Catholic ‘nerd camp’ for high school seniors in the Diocese of Cleveland.

Borromeo Seminary

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Philosophical Anthropology, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics,
and the work of Thomas Aquinas (Thomism)

Jonathan J. Sanford, Ph.D., is the 10th president of the University of Dallas. President Sanford, who previously served as provost and dean of UD’s undergraduate college, holds a doctorate in philosophy and is an accomplished scholar. Sanford has published widely on philosophical figures and topics, especially in foundational questions in moral philosophy, as evidenced in Before Virtue: Assessing Contemporary Virtue Ethics (The Catholic University of America Press, 2015 (paperback, 2019)). As president, he is focused on leading the implementation of the university’s strategic plan by building on the university’s reputation for academic rigor, its commitment to classical Western tradition, and its faithful Catholic identity. 

Sanford is a trustee of the Hildebrand Project, a member of the Dallas chapter of Legatus, a fellow of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, and  and is active in several other professional and academic organizations. 

University of Dallas

President & Professor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Ethics, Catholic Higher Education, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Metaphysics, Virtue Theory

Elizabeth Shaw is assistant director for special academic programs at the Arthur & Carlyse Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship and a lecturer in the School of Philosophy and the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America. For several years she has assisted in the preparation of new releases from the Hildebrand Press. Dr. Shaw teaches online for the Catholic Distance University and is also associate editor of The Review of Metaphysics and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly. For eight years she was research assistant to Catholic intellectual Michael Novak. She has a B.S. in mathematics from Georgetown University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from Catholic University.

Catholic University of America

Assistant Director, Special Academic Programs, Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship; Lecturer, School of Philosophy

Research Areas:

American Philosophy, Ethics, Personalism, Catholic Social Thought

DT Sheffler is a philosopher who specializes in the history of the concept of the person. He was profoundly touched by reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou as a teenager and, a few years later, Christian personalists, especially Dietrich von Hildebrand and Karol Wojtyła. This combined with a passionate interest in Ancient philosophy and patristic thought to produce an investigation into the origins of personalism and the foundations for the insights achieved in the twentieth century. This led to doctoral work on Plato’s conception of the self and the soul as a way to understand the pre-Christian background of early Christian thought. He has also continued his research of personalism, especially the thought of Dietrich von Hildebrand and has participated in the Hildebrand Project in various ways since 2015. Dan lives in Louisville with his wife and three children where he teaches philosophy at Memoria College.

Memoria College

Professor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Ancient Philosophy, Platonism, Early Christianity, Christian Personalism, Philosophy of Religion

Hrvoje holds a BA in Business and MA in Economics from the University of Zagreb. He also holds a second BA and MA in Philosophy, also from the same University. Currently he is pursuing the PhD in Philosophy at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, where he is preparing a dissertation on Dietrich von Hildebrand’s political philosophy. He is also working as Director of Partnerships for World Youth Alliance Foundation based in New York, an organization with more than 1 million members worldwide, committed to promote human dignity, solidarity and right to life in policy, education and culture. In the past he worked as a business consultant. He is an author of the book Amoris Laetitia: Faithfulness or Break? From Wojtyła to Pope Francis and co-author of The Textbook of Catholic Religious Education for the 2nd Grade of High School in Croatia. He published articles in peer-reviewed journals on political philosophy, bioethics and philosophy of the human person. He is happily married and has one child.

John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin

Doctoral Student

Research Areas:

Political Philosophy, Ethics, Bioethics, Philosophy of the Human Person, Phenomenology

Dr. Wolter graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy, Theology, and History from Franciscan University of Steubenville. She pursued her M.A. in Philosophy, as well as her STB, M.A., and STL in Theology at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven (KUL), Belgium, where she also received her Ph.D. in Philosophy. An Austrian-American national, she returned to Austria upon receiving her present appointment at Franciscan University of Steubenville at its Study Abroad Program in Gaming, Austria, in 2007.

Franciscan University, Austria Program

Instructor of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Phenomenology, Modern and Renaissance Philosophy, Axiology, Personalism, and Ethics.