Matt and Amanda

Matt and Amanda were born and raised in Texas, where they attended the same evangelical protestant church as children and dated in high school, after which Matt spent a year and a half at Wake Forest in North Carolina before returning to Texas to be near Amanda. While Amanda earned a degree in Education with a concentration in Music, Matt finished his bachelor’s degree in Humanities at Southern Methodist University (SMU) and then earned an MA in English and a PhD in Literature from the University of Dallas (UD), where they entered into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2016. Their first two children were born in Texas. In 2017, the family moved to Bismarck, ND, where their next two children were born and where Matt taught at the University of Mary for six years as an Assistant Professor before foregoing promotion to move the family to a farmstead in Vermont, where (after reading many books about such) they sought to learn about homesteading and farming hands-on. Their fifth child was born almost exactly a year after their move to Vermont. In their roughly two years of homesteading, they have raised chickens, ducks, and quail, cattle, sheep, and pigs, as well as a few dogs and a barn cat while tapping maples for syrup, keeping bees for honey, tending a garden, and foraging wild fruit. Matt currently teaches select courses for the Classical Education MA program at UD and has also recently taught courses for the Albertus Magnus Institute.