These are some things I've written or co-authored. I enjoy collaboration.
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HUNGRY BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS
"Only Matt Halteman could have penned Hungry Beautiful Animals. Drawing from personal experiences and philosophical insights, this timely exploration of the profound impact of our dietary choices on both individual and collective flourishing is essential reading for anyone who eats. Halteman offers a fresh perspective on going vegan, one that doesn’t require you to give up your favorite foods or compromise your cultural traditions. Instead, Hungry Beautiful Animals invites us to embrace the beauty and abundance that vegan living can provide, not as a sacrifice but as a joyful celebration of life on this planet."
Bryant Terry
James Beard award-winning author of Vegetable Kingdom, Editor-in-Chief of 4 Color Books
"This is a book of sacred truths, the kind of thing you read and your soul forever registers what’s so. There is poetry herein, and common sense, for sure; there is thorough academic exploration so that every word feels solid. But what is most enriching, the thing that will stay with you, is that Matt’s words feel like a gateway into our Better. One gets the sense that the time is now, and we can rise to it. And Matt is that seasoned, trustworthy guide to deliver us there."
Kathy Freston
New York Times best-selling author ofThe Lean.
"Welcome to Matt Halteman’s affirming vision for all of us hungry beautiful animals. Settle into time with an author who believes in our ability to transform moral burdens into gifts of consciousness and lives of abundance. Park feelings of shame, guilt, or blame at the door—they aren’t needed here. Instead, in this readable, entertaining, evocative, and joyful book, Matt Halteman offers us vulnerable, questing, caring animals a compass for our compassion and recipes for our individual and collective flourishing."
Carol J. Adams
Activist, Independent Scholar, and author of the feminist-vegan classic The Sexual Politics of Meat
"This compelling read calls us to breathe into our humanity and to understand how our joy increases when we help bring joy to others. We are all connected, and anytime someone experiences kindness, whether human or more than human, our world is made better."
Gene Baur
President and Cofounder of Farm Sanctuary
"Vegan advocacy is vitally important and urgently needed. It is also thorny terrain, which is why it needs eloquent, informed ambassadors, preferably with a sense of humor. Matt Halteman delivers magnificently on all fronts. I utterly recommend this book!"
Jonathan Balcombe
New York Times bestselling author of Super Fly and What a Fish Knows
"Matthew C. Halteman is a brilliant, incisive thinker and gifted storyteller who writes gorgeous, sharp, vivid prose—page for page and sentence for sentence, not despite but amid sometimes grisly, subtle and often hilarious observations about being human, his work is a total joy to read. But all of this is second to Halteman’s honesty—a rhetorical transparency and open-handedness so complete that his vulnerability in Hungry Beautiful Animals is nothing short of incandescent. His willingness to bare the most human of his shortcomings and failures, be they intellectual, spiritual, or personal—without guile, without defensiveness, and without advocating for any brittle or extreme ethical ground—is both inspiring and urgently important. Hungry Beautiful Animals is as much a gritty, get-real book about food ethics as it is a rigorous, unpredictable spiritual memoir and a gentle unfolding of increasingly difficult questions about what it means to be a person engaged in the process of examining their life."
Bonnie Nadzam
author of the novels Lamb and Lions, Research Fellow at Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program
"Hungry Beautiful Animals is the work of a seasoned philosopher and masterful storyteller. It is a deeply honest and intimate but also ebullient book. Halteman doesn’t try to argue the reader into anything, but instead uses indirection, humor, and story to make “going vegan” a salient (and joyful!) option for everyone. By the end, no gap remains between the feeling that one ought to do this and the feeling that one wants to."
Andrew Chignell
Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor, Princeton University, and co-director of The Princeton Food Project
"This book is remarkable. Halteman invites his readers into an engaging journey of reflection that will leave few unchanged. He sets aside the all-too-common dour and dutiful discussions of this territory in favour of a gentle and winsome invitation to see and feel the attraction of eating differently. I challenge you to read the first few pages with confidence that you’ll enjoy Halteman’s company until the end."
David Clough
Chair in Theology and Applied Sciences, University of Aberdeen, UK
"A visceral argument for the embrace of a joyous vegan lifestyle, advocating that we must alleviate the profound suffering of our fellow travelers on this journey through life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after."
Christof Koch
Meritorious Investigator, Allen Institute, and author of Then I Am Myself the World
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HUNGRY BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS
"Only Matt Halteman could have penned Hungry Beautiful Animals. Drawing from personal experiences and philosophical insights, this timely exploration of the profound impact of our dietary choices on both individual and collective flourishing is essential reading for anyone who eats. Halteman offers a fresh perspective on going vegan, one that doesn’t require you to give up your favorite foods or compromise your cultural traditions. Instead, Hungry Beautiful Animals invites us to embrace the beauty and abundance that vegan living can provide, not as a sacrifice but as a joyful celebration of life on this planet."
Bryant Terry
James Beard award-winning author of Vegetable Kingdom, Editor-in-Chief of 4 Color Books
"This is a book of sacred truths, the kind of thing you read and your soul forever registers what’s so. There is poetry herein, and common sense, for sure; there is thorough academic exploration so that every word feels solid. But what is most enriching, the thing that will stay with you, is that Matt’s words feel like a gateway into our Better. One gets the sense that the time is now, and we can rise to it. And Matt is that seasoned, trustworthy guide to deliver us there."
Kathy Freston
New York Times best-selling author ofThe Lean.
"Welcome to Matt Halteman’s affirming vision for all of us hungry beautiful animals. Settle into time with an author who believes in our ability to transform moral burdens into gifts of consciousness and lives of abundance. Park feelings of shame, guilt, or blame at the door—they aren’t needed here. Instead, in this readable, entertaining, evocative, and joyful book, Matt Halteman offers us vulnerable, questing, caring animals a compass for our compassion and recipes for our individual and collective flourishing."
Carol J. Adams
Activist, Independent Scholar, and author of the feminist-vegan classic The Sexual Politics of Meat
"This compelling read calls us to breathe into our humanity and to understand how our joy increases when we help bring joy to others. We are all connected, and anytime someone experiences kindness, whether human or more than human, our world is made better."
Gene Baur
President and Cofounder of Farm Sanctuary
"Vegan advocacy is vitally important and urgently needed. It is also thorny terrain, which is why it needs eloquent, informed ambassadors, preferably with a sense of humor. Matt Halteman delivers magnificently on all fronts. I utterly recommend this book!"
Jonathan Balcombe
New York Times bestselling author of Super Fly and What a Fish Knows
"Matthew C. Halteman is a brilliant, incisive thinker and gifted storyteller who writes gorgeous, sharp, vivid prose—page for page and sentence for sentence, not despite but amid sometimes grisly, subtle and often hilarious observations about being human, his work is a total joy to read. But all of this is second to Halteman’s honesty—a rhetorical transparency and open-handedness so complete that his vulnerability in Hungry Beautiful Animals is nothing short of incandescent. His willingness to bare the most human of his shortcomings and failures, be they intellectual, spiritual, or personal—without guile, without defensiveness, and without advocating for any brittle or extreme ethical ground—is both inspiring and urgently important. Hungry Beautiful Animals is as much a gritty, get-real book about food ethics as it is a rigorous, unpredictable spiritual memoir and a gentle unfolding of increasingly difficult questions about what it means to be a person engaged in the process of examining their life."
Bonnie Nadzam
author of the novels Lamb and Lions, Research Fellow at Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program
"Hungry Beautiful Animals is the work of a seasoned philosopher and masterful storyteller. It is a deeply honest and intimate but also ebullient book. Halteman doesn’t try to argue the reader into anything, but instead uses indirection, humor, and story to make “going vegan” a salient (and joyful!) option for everyone. By the end, no gap remains between the feeling that one ought to do this and the feeling that one wants to."
Andrew Chignell
Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor, Princeton University, and co-director of The Princeton Food Project
"This book is remarkable. Halteman invites his readers into an engaging journey of reflection that will leave few unchanged. He sets aside the all-too-common dour and dutiful discussions of this territory in favour of a gentle and winsome invitation to see and feel the attraction of eating differently. I challenge you to read the first few pages with confidence that you’ll enjoy Halteman’s company until the end."
David Clough
Chair in Theology and Applied Sciences, University of Aberdeen, UK
"A visceral argument for the embrace of a joyous vegan lifestyle, advocating that we must alleviate the profound suffering of our fellow travelers on this journey through life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after."
Christof Koch
Meritorious Investigator, Allen Institute, and author of Then I Am Myself the World
NEW BOOK CHAPTER: "Diversifying Effective Altruism's Longshots in Animal Advocacy", Chapter 6 in The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, eds. Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. CLICK TO READ!
NEW ARTICLE: "Imagining Creation as a Christian Vegan" CLICK TO READ!
NEW ARTICLE: "Reimagining Our Kinship with Animals" (with Megan Halteman Zwart) CLICK TO READ!
NEW ARTICLE: "Meat and Evil" in Andrew P. Chignell, Evil: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts) CLICK TO READ!
NEW ARTICLE: "Against Inefficacy Objections: The Real Economic Impact of Individual Consumer Choices on Animal Agriculture" CLICK TO READ!
NEW ARTICLE: "We Are All Noah: Tom Regan's Olive Branch to Religious Animal Ethics" CLICK TO READ!
NEW ARTICLE: "Eating Toward Shalom: Why Food Ethics Matters For the 21st-Century Church" CLICK TO READ!
NEW BOOK! Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments About the Ethics of Eating! CLICK TO PREVIEW!
"Philosophy as Therapy for Recovering (Unrestrained) Omnivores" (2016)
"Ontotheology" (2015)
"Knowing the Standard American Diet By Its Fruits" (2013)
"Religion and the Sublime" (2012)
"Varieties of Harm to Animals in Industrial Farming" (2011)
Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation (2010) CLICK TO PREVIEW!
