Reading Groups

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. 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

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. 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.

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)

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

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