Matthew Walz

Matthew Walz was born in New York, but grew up mostly in Ohio. He completed undergraduate studies at Christendom College, double-majoring in philosophy and theology and graduating as the valedictorian of the class of 1995. He did graduate studies in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America (CUA). There he earned a doctorate in philosophy by completing a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of free will.

Matthew has been teaching at the college level since 1998. As a graduate student, he taught for two years at CUA. Then he began teaching at Thomas Aquinas College, where he remained for eight years. Since 2008 he has been a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dallas (UD). He served as Chair of the Philosophy Department for four years. In the summer of 2012, he began serving as the Director of the Philosophy & Letters and Pre-Theology Programs at UD and became the Director of Intellectual Formation at Holy Trinity Seminary. Since the summer of 2022, moreover, he has been serving as Associate Dean of the Constantin College of Liberal Arts at UD.

Matthew’s research and writing focus primarily on medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. As his publications indicate, in addition to Aquinas, his favorite philosophical authors include Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Wojtyla/John Paul II.

Matthew has been married to his lovely wife Teresa since 1999. They have been blessed with eight children (two boys and six girls) who keep them busy, of course, but also joyful and grateful to God for His multitudinous gifts.

Book translation

Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion (including Gaunilo’s objections and Anselm’s reply), translated and introduced by Matthew D. Walz (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013).

Articles

“A ‘Kingdom of Friends’: Personal Dimensions of Aquinas’s Moral World,” The Aquinas Review 25 (2022): 59-76.

“Study, Truth, and Personal Formation: Reflections on John Paul II’s Pastores dabo vobis,” International Journal of Christianity and Education 25 (2021): 277-89.

“Toward a Causal Account of Priestly Formation: A Reading of Pastores dabo vobis,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review (January 28, 2021, https://www.hprweb.com/2021/01/toward-a-causal-account-of-priestly-formation/).

“Education as Intellectual Healing: Pedagogical Dimension of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy,” in: Liberal Arts and Core Texts in the World of Our Students, ed. G. Camp (The ACTC Liberal Arts Institute, 2021), 33-37.

“From Monasticism to Scholasticism: Reflections on Anselm and Aquinas,” in: The Arts and Sciences of a Core Text Education: What Are They? Why Do We Need Them?, ed. S. Ashmot and K. Tom (The ACTC Liberal Arts Institute, 2021), 45–49.

“At the Heart of Atheism: Aquinas on the Two Basic Objections to a God’s Existence,” in: Bridging Divides, Crossing Borders, Community Building: The Human Voice in Core Texts and the Liberal Arts, eds. T. Hoang and D. Nuckols (The ACTC Liberal Arts Institute, 2021), 139-44.

“Death by Incarnation,” Logos 23 (2020): 19–35.

“Synthesizing Aquinas and Newman on Religion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 86 (2019): 173–98.

“Augustine’s Modification of Liberal Education: Reflections on De doctrina Christiana,” Arts of Liberty 1 (2013): 51–97.

“Stoicism as Anesthesia: Philosophy’s ‘Gentler Remedies’ in Boethius’s Consolation,” International Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2011): 501–19.

“An Erotic Pattern of Thinking in Anselm’s Proslogion,” Quaestiones Disputatae 2 (2011): 126–45.

“The ‘Logic’ of Faith Seeking Understanding: A Propaedeutic for Anselm’s Proslogion,” Dionysius 28 (2010): 131–66.

“The Opening of On Interpretation: Toward a More Literal Reading,” Phronesis 51 (2006): 230–51.

“What is a Power of the Soul? Aquinas’s Answer,” Sapientia 60 (2006): 319–48.

“Theological and Philosophical Dependencies in Bonaventure’s Argument Against an Eternal World,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 97 (1998): 75–98.

Invited publications

Foreword to Wayne Hankey, Aquinas’s Neoplatonism in the Summa theologiae on God: A Short Introduction (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2019).

“Boethius, Christianity, and the Limits of Stoicism,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 45 (2018), 407–25.

“Boethius and Stoicism,” in: The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition, ed. J. Sellars (London: Routledge, 2016): 70–84.