Matthew Wright | People, Biola University

Department	Torrey Honors College
Biola Affiliations	Faculty
Website	https://scriptoriumdaily.com/author/matthewwright/

Documents

Degrees

Ph.D., University of Texas
B.A., Biola University
Visiting Student Research Collaborator, Princeton University

Biography

Matthew Wright is a political theorist who specializes in the Thomistic-Aristotelian natural law tradition. This entails a methodology particularly sensitive to the diverse forms of natural association and authority that fall within political communities. He is interested in understanding how groups like families and churches relate to the political community and what political life uniquely contributes to the full development of human social capacities.

Affiliations

American Political Science Association
Southwestern Political Science Association
American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy

Publications

Refereed Publications

“The Aim of Law and the Nature of Political Community: An Assessment of Finnis on Aquinas,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 54 (2009): 133-160.
“Natural Law, Civic Friendship, and Stanley Hauerwas’s Counter-Polis Thesis,” in Natural Law and Evangelical Political Thought (Lexington Books, 2013), 225-249.

Articles

“Getting Dignity Right,” published in the web magazine Public Discourse, August 17, 2012 (http://www.thepublicdiscourse....)
“Prepared to Lead: A Defense of Liberal Education,” Symposium (publication of Torrey Honors College) 2, no. 3 (2002): 1-2.
“Seeking the Greater Good,” Symposium 1, no. 4 (2001): 5
“The Changing Idea of a University: American Higher Education and the Illiberal Use of Knowledge.”
http://www.acton.org/programs/...

Presentations

“Civic Friendship as the Substantive Political Good,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 27-30, 2013.
“The Common Good, Civic Friendship, and Political Authority,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 30-September 2, 2012.
“Material and Special Parts in Aquinas’s Understanding of the Body Politic,” presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 12-14, 2012.
Discussant for panel, “Theories of Moral and Political Obligation” at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 12-14, 2012.
“Formal Properties of the Political Common Good,” presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, March 31-April 3, 2011.
“Disentangling the Social and the Political in Thomistic Political Thought,” presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 2009.
“The Roles of Family and State in the Moral Education of Children,” presented at the annual conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, The Family: Searching for Fairest Love, South Bend, Indiana, November 6-8, 2008.