Erik van Versendaal, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Humanities and Core Fellow at the University of St. Thomas, and serves as Director of the Core. His research and teaching concern the fruitful exchange between Catholic philosophy and theology, as well as the mediating role of poetry in this relationship. He turns to principal figures in the tradition—Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and Hegel—with attention to the meaning of being and of the human person, especially as contemplated in the light cast by God’s self-revelation in Christ.

Van Versendaal received his doctorate from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America, where he wrote his dissertation on the anthropology of the Catholic metaphysician Ferdinand Ulrich, focusing on the communal character of freedom. His recent articles and book chapters address such matters as education in Plato’s Phaedrus, conversation in Dante’s Paradiso, mercy in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and the thought of William Desmond, and he is currently completing a translation of Ferdinand Ulrich’s final work, Gift and Forgiveness: A Contribution toward a Biblical Ontology, to be published by Humanum Academic Press.