Hildebrand Project
The Hildebrand Project began with a simple conviction: that Dietrich von Hildebrand’s profound insights on truth, beauty, and the human person deserve a wider audience.
This year, we took major steps toward fulfilling that vision by beginning a concerted, multi-year effort to elevate Hildebrand’s profile among two key constituencies…
On November 25, 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) released Una caro, a major document reaffirming the Church’s perennial teaching on monogamy, with particular attention to the essential role of unity in the love between a man and a woman in marriage, and drawing frequently on the works of Deitrich and Alice von Hildebrand.
New Release: Plato & Christian Personalism by D.T. Sheffler, a refreshing reappraisal that makes the case for an intellectual affinity between Plato and Christian personalist philosophy.
This groundbreaking study challenges a scholarly impasse that has persisted for generations. Personalist philosophers have criticized Plato for allegedly devaluing the individual person, while Platonic scholars have confined their subject to the archives of ancient history. D.T. Sheffler reveals that both traditions have missed something crucial: Plato’s philosophy offers unexpected resources for understanding personalist commitments.
Sheffler demonstrates that Plato’s revolutionary insights about the soul—its transcendence, its dignity, its capacity for self-knowledge—established philosophical foundations that resonate deeply with later Christian personalism. Far from reducing persons to abstract ideas, Plato articulated what makes each human soul irreducibly unique and infinitely valuable in ways that anticipate central personalist concerns.
Drawing on careful textual analysis and engaging particularly with Dietrich von Hildebrand’s phenomenological personalism, this book reveals surprising points of contact and mutual enrichment between ancient Athens and contemporary philosophy. Sheffler shows how Plato’s understanding of consciousness, moral agency, and human dignity addresses questions that remain central to personalist thought.
Philosophical contemplation (theoria), as Plato, Hildebrand, and Sheffler conceive it, is not merely a way of life, but is an initiation into a divine way of life.
Mark K. Spencer
D.T. Sheffler is a professor of philosophy and academic dean at Memoria College, and an Associated Scholar at the Hildebrand Project. His research and writing focus on Christian Platonism, early Christianity, and beauty.
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New Release: Hildebrand’s Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, a celebration of the power and beauty of music, is now available in the first complete English edition.
In one of his most well-known and beloved books, Dietrich von Hildebrand walks us through the Beatitudes and the spiritual life with an unrivaled clarity and depth. Transformation in Christ is a practical work on Christian perfection, utilizing Hildebrand’s unique philosophical and religious insights.
A major contribution to the only important question: the transformation of our soul in Christ.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
We published 35 episodes of our podcast, Lily: The Voice of Alice von Hildebrand discussing Transformation in Christ. With her characteristic wit and charm, Alice walks us through her husband’s most beloved work. She provides us with unique insights from the book that had the most profound impact on her life from the moment she first heard Dietrich speak about it in 1942.
Hildebrand Project Associated Scholars Maria Wolter, Mark K. Spencer, and James Beauregard examine the important first chapter of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Transformation in Christ, “The Readiness to Change.”
This panel was recorded at the 2022 Summer Seminar, “The Readiness to Change.”
From scholars, students, and readers
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