Board of Directors

Grattan Brown is a Catholic theologian who has written about social ethics, bioethics, and education for 25 years. He has published articles in the National Catholic Register, National Review Online, Public Discourse, National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, and The Journal of Clinical Ethics. He researched religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute (2001-2004, Washington, DC), taught moral theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary (2004-2008, Philadelphia, PA), and taught theology at Belmont Abbey College (2008-2018, Belmont, NC), helped launch start-up Thales College (2018-2022, Raleigh, NC) and taught theology at Bishop Ireton High School (2022-2024, Alexandria, VA). He currently serves as the Director of Mission & Ministry at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, DC.

Catherine Peters is a tenured associate professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, California). She specializes in medieval philosophy, with a particular focus on the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna. She completed her undergraduate studies at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan and her graduate studies at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Central to her work is the consideration of how medieval thought might inform and advance our attempts to answer fundamental questions such as “who am I?”, “what do we know?”, “what should we do?” and “is there a God?” She is passionate about translating medieval philosophy into modern terms and applying its insight to perennial problems and concerns. Peters has been a lifetime member of the Fellowship of Catholic Studies since 2014.

Joseph E. Davis is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and Director of the Picturing the Human Project of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. His research explores the intersecting questions of self, morality, and cultural change, with a focus on medicine and psychiatry. His most recent book is Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery (Chicago), and the co-edited volume The Evening of Life (Notre Dame). His articles have appeared in both professional journals and morepopular publications, such as First Things, The New Atlantis, and Aeon/Psyche. He writes aPsychology Today blog called “Our New Discontents,” and is working on a new book tentatively titled, “The Troubles of Youth.”

David P. Deavel is Associate Professor in and Chairman of the Theology Department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. He has a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Calvin University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Fordham University in Historical Theology. A former Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, the 2013 winner of the Acton Institute’s Novak Prize, and the editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture for six years, he now serves on the boards of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, University Faculty for Life, the Adeodatus Foundation. He is co-editor of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, serves on the boards of Logos and CUA Press’s Catholic Women Writers series, and his academic writing has appeared in many books and journals, including The Chesterton Review, Journal of Markets & Morality, New Blackfriars, and Nova et Vetera. A Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative and a columnist for AMAC Newsline, his public and popular writing has appeared in Catholic World Report, Claremont Review of Books, First Things, Law & Liberty, and Wall Street Journal. He lives in Sugar Land, Texas, with his wife, Catherine, and their children.

Fr. John Gavin, S.J., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He specializes in Patristics. He is the author, most recently, of Mysteries of the Lord’s Prayer: Wisdom from the Early Church (CUA Press, 2021) and the forthcoming Growing into God: Christian Maturation and the Fathers of the Church (CUA Press, 2025).

Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Elizabeth R. Kirk is an Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, where she also serves as Co-Director of its Center for Law and the Human Person.

Elizabeth’s scholarship focuses on law and the family, including issues such as parental rights, reproductive technologies, abortion jurisprudence, and child welfare and adoption. She also explores the relationship, both complementary and contrasting, between the Catholic intellectual tradition and law.

Elizabeth previously served as a law clerk for Judge Daniel A. Manion on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She holds an undergraduate degree cum laude in English Literature from the University of Missouri, a law degree magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and has done graduate studies in theology.

Siobhan Nash-Marshall is a Professor of Philosophy and the Mary T. Clark Chair of Christian Philosophy at Manhattanville University in New York. A prolific author, her latest publications include George (2022), that has been translated into Italian, The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide (2018), that has been translated into Italian and Armenian. She publishes regularly in Luoghi dell’infinito, the Imaginative Conservative, and elsewhere. Prof. Nash-Marshall enjoys lecturing and does so often. Her favorite animal is the human being. She set up CINF USA (https://cinfusa.org/) to protect that vilified species abroad. She also founded MIETA (https://ethics-institute.org) in order to foster ethical and logical teaching in US high school students. What drives Professor Nash-Marshall is the realization that symphilosophein – reflecting and reasoning together on the truth and attempting to live in accordance with it – is on the verge of extinction and that to keep the art alive it does not suffice to read Aquinas in Latin or the Masoretic Text in Hebrew. Rather, one must focus on education. Like Our Lord who went to the people to be their Rabbi, the Catholic scholar must on His behalf, and on behalf of the Mater et Magistra, protect and teach the youth.

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk is an American economist and social philosopher at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DCatherine Ruth Pakaluk is an American economist and social philosopher at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Pakaluk is author of the acclaimed ethnography Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery, 2024), a multidisciplinary account of American women choosing to have large families against the global trend to sub-replacement fertility. Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Slate, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and more. She holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard University. Mother of eight children, she is married to philosopher Michael Pakaluk.

William L. Saunders is a religious liberty and human rights scholar at The Catholic University of America. He is Law Fellow with the Institute for Human Ecology, Professor and Director of the Program in Human Rights in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Co-director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Columbus School of Law.

Mr. Saunders is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Victims of Communism Museum. He also serves as a Consultant for the USCCB’s Committee on International Justice and Peace. He is co-founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.

Before joining The Catholic University of America, Mr. Saunders served as Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel with Americans United for Life for ten years. For three years, he served as Special Assistant at the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights. From 1999 to 2009, he was Senior Fellow in Bioethics and Human Rights Counsel at the Family Research Council.

Mr. Saunders attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead scholarship. He obtained his degree in law from the Harvard Law School.

Mr. Saunders was featured in Harvard’s first Guide to Conservative Public Interest Law in 2003 and again in the 2008 edition. He served on Harvard’s Advisory Committee for its 2008 celebration of public interest law. A member of the Supreme Court bar, he has authored numerous legal briefs in state, federal, foreign, and international courts. He is Chair Emeritus of the Religious Liberties Practice Group of the Federalist Society.

Mr. Saunders’  book, Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases Under Scrutiny, was published in 2019. His articles and book chapters have been published by the university presses of Harvard, Villanova, Brigham Young, Fordham, Georgetown, Houston, Scranton, and The Catholic University of America, as well as by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Freedom House, Greenhaven Press, Rowan & Littlefield, Praeger, St. Augustine’s, and Intervarsity press. He has given lectures and participated in debates at many colleges, universities, and law schools, including Princeton, Harvard, Georgetown, and Notre Dame. He delivered the annual J. Michael Miller Lecture at the University of St. Thomas (on international law) in February 2007, the annual R. Wayne Kraft Memorial Lecture (on bioethics) at DeSales University in February 2004 and the annual James Moore Lecture (on human rights violations in Sudan) at Millikin University in 1999. He has also lectured, and/or has been published, in many foreign countries, including Italy, Germany, Poland, Austria, Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Mexico, Qatar, Malaysia, Romania, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.

In addition to speaking and writing frequently on bioethics topics, Mr. Saunders has submitted testimony to the President’s Council on Bioethics, as well as to UNESCO’s Committee on Bioethics, and has briefed Congressional staff and state legislatures. He is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.

Mr. Saunders has appeared often in the media, including BBC World News, CNN, Fox News, EWTN, Vatican Radio, and National Public Radio. His articles on issues have appeared in a variety of journals, such as First Things, Human Events, Human Life Review, The Legal Times, Communio, The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy, Ethics & Medics, and Touchstone.

Mr. Saunders served on the official United States delegation to the UN Special Session on Children in 2001/02. In 2011, he was a speaker at an official briefing at the UN, addressing the topic, why euthanasia is not a human right.

In 2004, he served on the NGO Working Committee in connection with the Doha Intergovernmental Conference for the Family.

Mr. Saunders is Senior Fellow with the Religious Freedom Institute, and Affiliated Scholar with the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a member of the boards of the International Right to Life Federation, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.

In 1999, Mr. Saunders founded Sudan Relief and Rescue, Inc. to aid the persecuted church and to combat slavery and genocide in Sudan. He continues to work and write on the subjects of religious persecution, slavery, and genocide.

Randall B. Smith is a Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas.  He completed a B.A. In Chemistry at Cornell College, a M.A. in Theology at the University of Dallas, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  He is the author of five books, including Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Emmaus, 2016), Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Scholastic Culture of Paris (Cambridge, 2021), From Here to Eternity: Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body (Emmaus, 2022), and Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God: Context and Commentary (Cambridge, 2024).  He is a frequent guest on Catholic radio and podcasts, and his articles appear every other week on The Catholic Thing.

Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. He has published over 100 articles in journals and edited collections, and a similar number of popular essays in venues such as Public Discourse, First Things, and National Review. He is the author of Lying and Christian Ethics and co-author of The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (with Dr. Farr Curlin) and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (with Robert P. George) as well as the editor of several collections, including John Paul II’s Contribution to Catholic Bioethics and Artificial Nutrition and Hydration: The New Catholic Debate. In 2019-20, he served as a Commissioner on the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. He has twice been a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University, as well as at the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest. In 2024-25 he is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.

Dr. Helena M. Tomko is associate professor of literature in the Department of Humanities at Villanova University. She studies the Catholic presence in mid-twentieth-century German literature and culture, in particular Theodor Haecker and other writers associated with the “inner exile” during the Third Reich. She also writes about Catholic fiction, with a current focus on sacramental humor in the mid-century Catholic novel. In 2007 she published Sacramental Realism: Gertrud von le Fort and German Catholic Literature in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Recent articles have appeared in venues including German Life and Letters, The German Quarterly, Religion and Literature, and Logos.

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 has served as Chair of the Philosophy Department for four years and as Associate Dean of Constantin College for two years. Since 2012 he has been the Director of the Philosophy & Letters and Pre-Theology Programs at UD and the Director of Intellectual Formation at Holy Trinity Seminary.

Matthew’s research and writing focus primarily on medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. Besides Aquinas, his favorite philosophical authors include Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Wojtyla.

Matthew has been married since 1999 to his lovely wife Teresa. 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.