Michael Waddell, Ph.D.

Autism, Faith, Family

Michael Waddell is an interdisciplinary scholar with more than 25 years of experience in higher education. He is active in the disability community, organizing autism training workshops, serving on boards, working for inclusion in the Catholic Church, and advocating for disability rights in the public sphere. He is especially interested in issues related to autism because two of his three daughters are on the spectrum and he was diagnosed with ASD as an adult.

Book Michael

Aquinas and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

Dr. Waddell has an abiding love of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. He has lectured on these topics at prominent universities including Oxford, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and published in top scholarly journals.

Speaking

Talks and keynotes about autism, disabilities, Thomas Aquinas, and the Catholic intellectual tradition.

Workshops and webinars exploring autism, philosophical and theological perspectives on disability, the lived experience of autistic people and families, and pressing political issues related to disability.

Essays on Autism

  • Autism and Work

    One of the most pressing problems in the autism community is finding employment for autistic adults. I think we need to be thinking bigger, though: thinking about finding meaningful work for people on the spectrum, not just employment. And I believe the Catholic tradition has some really interesting resources for helping us explore this issue.…

  • Thomas Aquinas, Social Ontology, and Autistic Identity

    Who would ever have imagined that St. Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century thinker, would have something interesting to contribute to discussions about autistic identity and the quest for a cure for autism? This guy! That’s who! Keep an eye out for my essay on “Thomas Aquinas, Social Ontology, and Autistic Identity,” forthcoming in the volume…

  • Autism and Assisted Suicide

    Did you know that there are countries where a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder can qualify a person for “access” to euthanasia and/or physician-assisted suicide? You can read my article about this serious problem at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23312521.2019.1694463.

Essays on Disability

Essays on Aquinas

  • Faith, Reason, and Radical Orthodoxy

    In Truth in Aquinas, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock attempt to render a “radically orthodox” reading of Aquinas that rejects an autonomous realm of natural reason unaided by faith. I argue that Milbank and Pickstock’s account fails as a reading of Aquinas and is problematic as a theory of the relationship between faith and reason.…

  • Rapture

    One of my favorite essays on Aquinas. Understanding Aquinas’s teaching on rapture really helps to stretch some common ways of thinking about Aquinas’s teaching on, well, thinking. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317784253_The_Importance_of_Rapture_in_the_Thought_of_Aquinas

  • Aquinas on Beauty

    Scholars have been fascinated by Aquinas’s very limited remarks about beauty for nearly 100 years. In this essay, I reflect on the place of beauty in Thomas Aquinas’s ontology, etiology, and psychology. I suggest that Thomas’s discussion of beauty in Summa theologiae 1.5.4, read in light of other important texts from Aquinas’s corpus, brings to…

Contact Michael

Use this form to inquire about speaking, webinars, writing collaborations, or questions related to autism, disabilities, Aquinas, and Catholic thought.

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