Matthew Walz

Matthew Walz is the President of Thomas More College (Merrimack, NH). He completed undergraduate studies at Christendom College, double-majoring in philosophy and theology and graduating as the valedictorian of the class of 1995. He completed graduate studies in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, writing a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of free will. He has been teaching at the college level since 1998: two years at The Catholic University of America, eight years in the interdisciplinary Great Books program at Thomas Aquinas College, and 18 years in the Philosophy Department at the University of Dallas. At UD, he served for a time as Chair of the Philosophy Department, Chair of the Faculty Senate, and Associate Dean of Constantin College. In addition, from 2012 to 2026, he was Director of the Philosophy & Letters and Pre-Theology Programs for UD and Director of Intellectual Formation for Holy Trinity Seminary. His teaching, research, and writing focus primarily on medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. Besides Aquinas, his favorite thinkers include Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Wojtyla. He has been married since 1999 to his lovely wife Teresa, and they have been blessed with eight children.

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.