Professor and author
Patrick Deneen, 59, is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2012. Previously he taught at Princeton University (1997-2005) and Georgetown University (2005-2012), where he held the Eleni and Markos Tsakopoulos Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies. He is the author of numerous essays and several books including Why Liberalism Failed, which has been translated into 14 languages. His most recent book, last year’s Regime Change, critiques the current political status quo and makes the case for a form of community-focused conservatism that seeks the common good.
Essayist, novelist and public speaker
Mary Eberstadt, 62, holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC, and is senior research fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute. A writer whose contributions to the intellectual landscape traverse genres, she is author of several non-fiction books including How the West Really Lost God and Adam and Eve After the Pill as well as The Loser Letters, analogous to CS Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Central to her diverse interests are questions concerning the fate and aspirations of postmodern men and women.
Catholic scholar and author
Anthony Esolen, 64, is a writer, social commentator and professor of humanities at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire. He taught at Providence College and the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts before moving to Magdalen in 2019. He is the author and translator of over 25 books, including the three-volume translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He is the author of numerous articles in publications such as the Modern Age, Catholic World Report, Crisis Magazine and Touchstone, for which he serves as a senior editor. He is the 2020 recipient of the Circe Institute’s Russell Kirk Prize. His web magazine Word and Song, which he publishes with his wife Debra, gives weekly hymn, poem and film recommendations.
Legal scholar, political philosopher and intellectual
Robert George, 68, serves as the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds JD and MTS degrees from Harvard University and a number of doctorate degrees from Oxford University, as well as 21 honorary degrees. A legal and political scholar, he is considered one of the country’s leading conservative intellectuals. He co-founded the American Principles Project, with funding from Sean Fieler, and is a past chairman of the National Organization for Marriage. In 2009, he was called the “most influential conservative Christian thinker” in the US by David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times. He has been awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal and, among other awards, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He has chaired the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and is also a former Judicial Fellow at the US Supreme Court, where he received the Justice Tom C Clark Award. His admirers say he is renewing a philosophy of Catholic natural law thinking that goes back to St Thomas Aquinas.
Theologian
Scott Hahn, 66, is a Catholic theologian and Christian apologist. He is the author of many bestselling books, including Rome Sweet Home, which details his and his wife’s conversion to Catholicism. Other notable works include: The Lamb’s Supper, Reasons to Believe and Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God. Hahn holds the Father Michael Scanlan Chair of Biblical Theology and the New Evangelization at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he has held professorship since 1990. A popular speaker and teacher, Hahn has delivered numerous talks on a wide variety of topics related to Scripture and the Catholic faith. His talks have been effective in helping thousands of Protestants and fallen-away Catholics to (re)embrace the Catholic faith. Hahn is married to Kimberly Hahn, who co-runs their Catholic apostolate, the St Paul Center for Biblical Theology.
Author
Dean Koontz, 78, is an American bestselling novelist whose books have sold over 500 million copies and have been published in 38 different languages, with 30 hitting the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. After being brought up in Pennsylvania by a “violent, alcoholic” father, he turned to reading as a way of escape and then to writing books. These cross genres, combining horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery and satire. Seeing the Catholic faith as an antidote to the chaos in his family, Koontz converted in college because faith provided existential answers for life; he admired Catholicism’s “intellectual rigour”, saying it permitted a view of life that saw mystery and wonder in all things. “I want to extravagantly entertain readers,” he has said, “while making them feel the wonder of life and consider its profound mysteries.” He shares the view of GK Chesterton that his writing is inspired by a “joy about the gift of life”. A prolific writer, Koontz releases multiple books a year. One published last year, After Death, tells the journey of a modern-day Lazarus who is humanity’s last hope. He lives in Shady Canyon, California with his wife, Gerda.
Conservative TV host
Larry Kudlow, 76, was the 12th director of the National Economic Council in the Trump administration, serving from from April 2018 to January 2021. A TV news host and commentator for the Fox network, he is a religious as well as a political convert. After being a left-wing activist, he became an economics adviser to the Reagan administration, serving two terms, and has been a leading conservative economist ever since. He was the 2022 recipient of the William F Buckley Prize for leadership in political thought. Twenty-eight years sober, Kudlow overcame cocaine and alcohol addiction after being fired from his investment banking position on Wall Street in the 1990s. After entering a 12-step programme, he converted to Catholicism with the spiritual help of Opus Dei priest Father C John McCloskey III. He has served on the Catholic Advisory Board of the Ave Maria Mutual Funds and as a member of the Jesuit-run Fordham University board of trustees.
Philosopher
Alasdair MacIntyre, 95, is a Scottish-American philosopher of moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology. His After Virtue (1981) is one of the best-known works of 20th-century political philosophy. He is senior research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics at London Metropolitan University, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and permanent senior distinguished research fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. Beginning his career as a Marxist, MacIntyre started working to develop a Marxist ethic that could rationally justify the moral condemnation of Stalinism. This eventually led him to reject Marxism and embrace a more Aristotelian form of ethics. In 1981, during the course of writing After Virtue, MacIntyre converted to Christianity; two years later, he converted to Catholicism. He carries out his work against the background of what he calls an “Augustinian-Thomist approach
to moral philosophy”.
Author and president, Renewal Ministries
Ralph Martin, 81, is a “renewal movement leader” and author. In 2022 he addressed the UK Confraternity of Catholic Priests in York, sponsored by the Catholic Herald. In 2023, he addressed the tenth annual Ave Maria University Marian Eucharistic Conference and the St Paul’s Center for Biblical Theology’s Priests Conferences, as well as speaking at many other events. He is president of Renewal Ministries, a body devoted to Catholic renewal and evangelisation. He hosts The Choices We Face, a weekly Catholic television and radio programme with a global audience. He is also a visiting professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He has published numerous books including The Fulfillment of All Desire (2006) and A Church in Crisis: Pathways Forward (2022).
Professor of Theology, Catholic University of America
Chad Pecknold has been a professor of historical and systematic theology in the School of Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC since 2008. He is the author of Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History, and the T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology. A contributing editor to the Catholic Herald, he publishes regularly on the Church and modern politics in First Things, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Pecknold is also the co-founder of the Postliberal Order and resident theologian at the Basilica of St Mary. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television shows such as NPR’s All Things Considered, Vatican Radio, Al Jazeera America, BBC World News, ABC News and he is a regular contributor on EWTN News Nightly. A self-described “Augustinian-Thomist”, Pecknold is an associate editor for the English edition of the international Thomistic journal of theology, Nova et Vetera, and co-edits, with Fr Thomas Joseph White, the new Sacra Doctrina series at Catholic University of America Press. In 2023, he spoke at the National Celebrate Life Day, alongside Lila Rosa and former US vice president Mike Pence, and is currently writing a book on Augustine’s City of God.
Conservative political pundit, journalist and thinker
Ramesh Ponnuru, 49, is a conservative political pundit and journalist. He is the editor of the National Review, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, a contributing editor to National Affairs and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life (2006) and The Mystery of Japanese Growth (1995). In 2015, Politico listed both him and his wife, April Ponnuru, as two of the top “Politico 50” influential leaders in American politics. Ramesh was raised by a Hindu father and a Lutheran mother. He was an agnostic for a time before converting to Catholicism. In 2006, he vigorously defended the Catholic basis for his pro-life stance, saying: “If I didn’t believe Catholic teachings were true, I wouldn’t be a Catholic.”
Author
California resident Tim Powers, 72, is a science fiction writer. He has twice won the World Fantasy Award, for his novels Last Call and Declare, and has twice won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award. He describes himself as a practising Catholic, and states: “Stories are more effective, and more truly represent the writer’s actual convictions, when they manifest themselves without the writer’s conscious assistance. I concern myself with my plots, but I let my subconscious worry about my themes.” The protagonist of his first novel, Epitaph in Rust (1976) escapes from a rural monastery into the “wilds of a future Los Angeles”. His recent novel, My Brother’s Keeper (2023), focuses on the relationship between Emily Brontë and her troubled brother Branwell, while exploring the family’s pseudo-Catholic theology.
Senior fellow, Religious Freedom Institute
Stephen Rasche is a recognised international expert on persecuted Christians and has served since 2010 as counsel to the Chaldean Archdiocese of Erbil, Iraq.
He is senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute for International Religious Freedom in Conflict Regions as well as an acclaimed documentary maker and author. His film, Francis in Iraq, covering Pope Francis’s 2020 visit to the persecuted Christians of Iraq, premiered in 2022 at New York’s Sheen Center with an address by Cardinal Dolan. A graduate of Boston College, Rasche has worked for 35 years in international business and humanitarian aid projects. He was a founding officer of the Catholic University in Erbil in 2014 and has served as a representative to the Vatican Dicastery on Refugees and Migrants. His most recent work has focused on anti-Christian violence in Nigeria and the international response to it.
Author
Roy H Schoeman, 73, is an author who converted from Judaism to Catholicism after an apparition of the Virgin Mary. He is famous for his writings on Catholic-Jewish relations. Schoeman’s most famous work is Salvation Is from the Jews, in which he argues that Christianity is the completion of Judaism and invites Jews to convert to the Catholic faith. His other books include Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ and Judaism: From a Catholic Perspective.
Schoeman taught theology at Ave Maria University and Holy Apostles College and Seminary, hosts a weekly Catholic radio show on Radio Maria and has an active YouTube channel.
Author and philanthropist
Nicholas Sparks, 58, is an author and philanthropist known for novels such as The Notebook, Dear John, The Wish and most recently Dreamland. His books have sold over 75 million copies in the United States alone. Sparks has donated to several local and national charities. He is a major contributor to the creative writing programme at his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, and together with his wife cofounded the Epiphany School in New Bern, North Carolina.
Legal scholar
Adrian Vermeule, 55, is a Catholic convert and legal scholar who is currently the Ralph S Taylor professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Vermeule is the author of eight books, including Law and the Limits of Reason. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Vermeule is known for his controversial advocacy of legal theories such as common-good constitutionalism and Catholic integralism, both of which seek to create a social order based on Catholic moral and social teaching. The Herald has dismissed integralism in a 2023 article called “How Catholics can lose friends and alienate people”.
Author and commentator
George Weigel, 72, is a prolific Catholic author and commentator who is currently a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and holds the think tank’s William E Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He has considerable influence in the Church, in the US and internationally. From 1986 to 1989, he served as the founding president of the James Madison Foundation. Weigel’s articles have appeared in such publications as First Things, National Review and the Wall Street Journal, and he has made television appearances on NBC and ETWN.
He is the author of 29 books including the bestselling biography of Pope St John Paul II, Witness to Hope. He is a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and he writes and serves on the board for the Institute for Religion and Public Life. He is a proponent of the New Evangelization. Most recently, Weigel has written against anti-semitism and for the protection of Jews worldwide. Weigel and his wife Joan live in north Bethesda, Maryland. They have three children.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald magazine. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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