Editor
Brian Besong
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Wolf-Kuhn Ethics Institute, Saint Francis University
Brian Besong is the journal’s editor. His work lies where ethics and epistemology meet, with particular attention to how natural law grounds moral knowledge, intuition, and the resolution of disagreement. He is the author of An Introduction to Ethics: A Natural Law Approach (2018) and Sex in Theory (2025), an extended defense of natural law’s sexual ethics. His articles have appeared in Synthese, Philosophy, Theoria, and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, the last of which awarded his work on the manual tradition its Rising Scholar Essay Prize.
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Associate Editors
James M. Jacobs
Professor of Philosophy, Notre Dame Seminary, New Orleans
James M. Jacobs directs the philosophy program and serves as associate academic dean at Notre Dame Seminary, where he has taught since 2003. A Thomist whose central concern is natural law ethics, he treats Thomistic realism as a living alternative to the nominalism and relativism of much modern thought. He is the author of Seat of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy in the Catholic Tradition (2022), and his articles have appeared in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Nova et Vetera, and elsewhere.
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Matthew K. Minerd
Book Reviews Editor
Managing Editor, Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology
Matthew K. Minerd works in the Thomistic tradition as a philosopher, moral theologian, and translator, and is managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology. He has recovered a generation of French and Latin scholarship for English readers, including major works of Charles Journet, Ambroise Gardeil, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Jean-Hervé Nicolas, Benedict Merkelbach, and others. He writes on philosophy, moral theology, theological methodology, and the natural law, and he took his doctorate at the Catholic University of America.
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Editorial Board
J. Budziszewski
Professor of Government and Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
J. Budziszewski has helped revive classical natural law thinking in contemporary moral and political philosophy. One of his best-known works, What We Can’t Not Know (2003), argues that basic moral truths are written into human nature and known to all, even those who deny them. Across books like The Revenge of Conscience (1999) and his Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law (2014), he defends the Thomistic tradition against modern skepticism, examining how conscience operates and how its suppression deforms individuals and cultures alike.
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Edward Feser
Professor of Philosophy, Pasadena City College
Edward Feser is one of the most prominent contemporary defenders of the classical natural law tradition. A leading Thomist and Aristotelian, he has revived classical metaphysics as the ground of natural law ethics. His books include Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (2009), Scholastic Metaphysics (2014), and, with Joseph Bessette, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed (2017), a natural law treatment of capital punishment.
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John Finnis
Biolchini Family Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame; Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus, University of Oxford
John Finnis is among the most influential natural law theorists of the twentieth century. His Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) returned natural law to the center of analytic jurisprudence, and with Germain Grisez and Joseph Boyle he developed what is often called the “new” natural law. His further works include Fundamentals of Ethics (1983) and Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (1998), among many others.
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Kevin Flannery, S.J.
Ralph McInerny Distinguished Research Fellow, University of Notre Dame; Professor Emeritus, Pontifical Gregorian University
Kevin L. Flannery, S.J., is a specialist in ancient philosophy and Thomistic action theory whose work clarifies the logical structure of natural law morality. Emeritus professor of the history of ancient philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University and a consultor of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, he brings Aristotelian logic and action theory to bear on the precepts of the natural law, defending its absolute prohibitions while addressing how intention and circumstance shape the moral species of an act. His books include Acts Amid Precepts: The Aristotelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory (2001) and Cooperation with Evil: Thomistic Tools of Analysis (2019).
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F. Russell Hittinger
Research (Ordinary) Professor, School of Philosophy, Catholic University of America and Executive Director, Institute for Human Ecology, The Catholic University of America
F. Russell Hittinger stands among the most penetrating interpreters of natural law in the Thomistic and Leonine traditions, illuminating its rightful place within Catholic social thought. His landmark works, such as A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (1987), The First Grace (2003), and, most recently, On the Dignity of Society (2024), have reshaped contemporary understanding of moral order, recovering the classical conviction that natural law is divine gift before human achievement. His scholarship bridges metaphysics, jurisprudence, and political philosophy, securing his reputation as an indispensable voice in the renewal of natural law inquiry.
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Matthew Levering
James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary
Matthew Levering is among the most prolific theologians of his generation, bringing Scripture and the Thomistic tradition to bear on the moral life. His Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach offers a standard treatment of natural law’s theological grounding, recovering a teleological vision in which moral knowledge flows from participation in divine wisdom. Beyond natural law, he has renewed moral theology by reintegrating it with biblical exegesis, dogmatics, and the virtues, resisting the modern divorce of ethics from doctrine. His work insists that the moral life remains intelligible only within a theocentric framework attentive to revelation and creation’s order.
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Jean Porter
John A. O’Brien Professor Emeritus of Theology, University of Notre Dame
Jean Porter is a major moral theologian known for a historically grounded recovery of natural law in critical dialogue with contemporary accounts. Among the most influential voices shaping how a generation of scholars reads the scholastic tradition, she reframes natural law not as a fixed code but as practical reason reflecting on human nature, shaped by theological conviction and open to historical development. Her landmark work resists both rigid rule-based readings and purely secular reconstructions, setting the terms for ongoing debate. Her books include Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (2005), Ministers of the Law (2010), and Justice as a Virtue (2016).
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