The After Dinner Scholar: Recent Episodes

Wyoming Catholic College

Weekly conversations about the Liberal Arts and The Great Books with Wyoming Catholic College professors, board members,and guests.

The first After-Dinner Scholar podcast on February 1, 2017 began:

The 16th century English philosopher, statesman and scientist Francis Bacon famously stated, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is,” he went on to explain, “some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

Much to my surprise, that first podcast was seven and a half years, 390 episodes, and more than 205,000 downloads ago. And as of this episode, I’m hanging up my headphones and (for the most part) my mortarboard.

Links:

The Eucharist Podcast with Wyoming Catholic College

Mars Hill Audio Journal

Dr. Jim Tonkowich at The Stream

Last week Dr. Tiffany Schubert discussed Inferno, the first book of Dante’s Comedy. Our friend and former colleague Jason Baxter remarked that in Inferno, “Dante’s poetic violence is meant to melt down the hard heart so that it can be reforged into something new.”

Purgatorio is the place where that melted down and malleable heart finds the forge, the place where the hammer of suffering purges all impurities and fashions our hard hearts into hearts perfected.

And finally Paradiso shows us the path of choosing the good, true, and beautiful habitually as we gaze on the Face of God eternally “lost,” as the hymnwriter put it, “in wonder, love, and praise.”

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

for the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard it is to tell

the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh—

the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so. (Inferno 1.1-7)

During Lent and now during Easter, our sophomores, under the guidance of Dr. Tiffany Schubert, have been reading Dante's Divine Comedy in their humanities class. And while that reading is academic, no one can avoid Dante’s emphasis throughout the poem on our spiritual lives.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote, "At Easter we rejoice because Christ did not remain in the tomb, his body did not see corruption; he belongs to the world of the living, not to the world of the dead; we rejoice because he is the Alpha and also the Omega, as we proclaim in the rite of the Paschal Candle; he lives not only yesterday, but today and for eternity."

Theologian Dr. Jeremy Holmes shares his insights about the risen Christ as we celebrate the Octave of Easter.

Saint Ephrem the Syrian said, “We give glory to you, Lord, who raised up your cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living.”

The cross is the bridge from death to life, from Hell to Heaven, from the judgment we deserve to the grace we can never deserve, from eternal captivity to the self to eternal freedom in God.

With that in mind, during this Holy Week, it seemed appropriate to rebroadcast a conversation with theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski about the four last things.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (159) declares

Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.

During their final spring semester in their science course, Wyoming Catholic College seniors consider the theory of evolution. Their professor, Dr. Daniel Shields guides them towards, as the college catalog puts it, “the ultimate goal of achieving a coherent synthesis of faith and reason.”

Observing the French Revolution, British Member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, noted, “But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

Over the past few weeks, our Wyoming Catholic College juniors have been considering the French Revolution with their professor Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos.

It’s been a strange winter here in Lander, Wyoming beginning with nearly two feet of snow on Thanksgiving—of which about fourteen inches fell between four and eight PM. Another foot or so just before Christmas and nothing but dribs and drabs after that. And now—a bit early—what’s left of that snow is melting in warm, early spring weather.

Not that we don’t think about getting outside and enjoying nature even in the depths of January, but as the days warm, fishing, gardening, hiking, and all the joys of the warm seasons become topics of conversation.

Nature. Nature is a fundamental part of a Wyoming Catholic College education because—well, nature is fundamental.

Dr. Stanley Grove shares about the place of nature in the college's curriculum and in our lives.

The new Apple Vision Pro headset, we’re told, “delivers fun and rewarding gameplay for players of all skill levels. Players can dive into games on the App Store that transform the space around them, use an Environment for a more immersive experience, or play compatible games on a screen as large as they want.”

What do we make of video games whether on phones, computers, TVs, or inside the Vision Pro? Are they sinful or perhaps as one pastor-theologian remarked, not sinful, but definitely dumb? Or…

Wyoming Catholic College senior, Greg Bowman, entitled his senior oration, “Are Video Games Fine Art?”

January 31 to February 2 the Wyoming Catholic College community enjoyed days packed with senior orations. Each senior, having written a thesis in the fall, presents his or her findings in a 30-minute lecture followed by questions from a faculty panel and the audience. It is a wonderful celebration of all our students accomplish in their years at Wyoming Catholic and it’s always a privilege to have students as guests on the podcast.

Moira Milligan’s oration was entitled “No Pain, No Gain: The Radical Nature of Sacrificial Love.” And she began with how she chose her topic.

This podcasts is "about the Great Books and the liberal arts," something that sets The After-Dinner Scholar apart from other audio blogs from Wyoming Catholic Collage.

Case in point, the college has launched a new podcast entitled “The Eucharist with Wyoming Catholic College” inspired by conversations about the National Eucharistic Revival.

The podcast features Wyoming Catholic College President Kyle Washut and, our guest, theology professor and academic dean, Dr. Jeremy Holmes.

The number of integers (1, 2, 3, 4, and so on) is infinite. And oddly enough so is the number of even integers (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and beyond). Meaning that the number of even integers is equal to the number of all integers, both odd and even. Welcome to infinity.

While it’s still winter, it’s not too early to think about Wyoming Catholic College’s summer PEAK program for high school juniors and seniors. In it we give them a taste of life at the college including backpacking, horseback riding, Catholic worship and devotion, and classes complete with homework and tests. Not only do high school students enjoy the two weeks of PEAK, but they walk away with a pretty good idea of what it would be like to come to college here at Wyoming Catholic. Many decide that it would be wonderful and join us as freshmen.

Mathematician Dr. Scott Olsson has taught a course at PEAK on infinity. And I asked Dr. Olsson to give us a finite preview of infinity. (To learn more about PEAK 2024, click here.)

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures,” remarks Anne Eliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. “None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”

It is always a great pleasure on the After-Dinner Scholar to introduce you to books written by our faculty and Dr. Tiffany Schubert’s book, Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism: Courtly Love and Happy Endings, has just been released.

While you and I sit by a delightful fire—or at least (assuming you live in a cool climate)—delightful central heating, our Wyoming Catholic College freshmen are spending a few nights in their Quinzees: giant mounds of snow, hollowed out to form shelters.

That seems an odd way to prepare for a rigorous second semester of Latin, theology, philosophy, humanities, math, and science. Yet we consider snow camping a vital part of a Wyoming Catholic College education.

Karl Eby, Wyoming Catholic College class of 2013 is the Assistant Director of our Outdoor Leadership Program sheds a little light on the Freshman Winter Trip.

“Social connection,” wrote U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in his May 2023 “Advisory on our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” “is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter. Throughout history, our ability to rely on one another has been crucial to survival.”

That may come as news to many modern Americans, but back in the fourth century BC Aristotle would have told you the same things. Friendship, he wrote in his Nichomachean Ethics, “is not only a necessary thing but a splendid one. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life.”

Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos recently taught The Nichomachean Ethics with our Wyoming Catholic College juniors and looking at, among other things, friendship.

This podcast was posted on December 26, the day after Christmas. It was the commemoration of St. Stephen’s martyrdom described in Acts chapter 7. On the 27th, we remember St. John, the only apostle who was not martyred. The 28th is the memorial of the Holy Innocents who were murdered by King Herod in his attempt to kill Jesus. And finally on Friday, we remember the martyrdom of St. Thomas a Becket.

Why do we do that during Christmas week? Wyoming Catholic College President Kyle Washut clarifies it for us.

During the first weeks of Advent, the Church directs our attention to the second advent of Christ, that day when he will come again in glory to gather his people into his resurrection, remake this tired, sinful world, and set all wrongs right. When he “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain" (Revelation 21:4).

In this last week, we focus on his first coming as the babe of Bethlehem, his coming into our world of tears, death, morning, and crying.

Theologian Dr. Jeremy Holmes in his personal spiritual life, in his scholarship, in the classroom, and in his book Cur Deus Verba: Why the Word Became Word has spend a great deal of time considering the mystery of the Incarnation, of God become flesh.

Morten Lawridsen's "O magnum mysterium," which Dr. Holmes mentioned, can be found here.

The music coming over the air—for those who still listen to the radio—and in various Christmas mixes from Pandora, Apple Music, Spotify, and so on tends to be a wild and wooly mix including everything from “O Holy Night” to “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” It’s a mishmash of worship, good theology, horrible theology, family, home, childhood, greed, and, of course, romance.

As we try to sort it all out, here are some thoughts from Wyoming Catholic College’s choir director and composer-in-residence, Paul Jernberg.

Virgil's Aeneid tells us about the founding of Rome and begins with the destruction of Troy at the end of the Trojan War, the war recounted in The Iliad. As the Greeks burn and sack Troy, Aeneas escapes with his father, his son, his household gods, and a small band of fellow refugees to found a new Troy—greater, more powerful, and more magnificent than the old Troy—in Italy.

Dr. Tiffany Schubert has been teaching The Aeneid to our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores.

Last Sunday was the Solemnity of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe which was instituted by Pope Pius XI with his 1925 encyclical Quas Primas (In the First) as a response to “those bitter enmities and rivalries between nations, which still hinder much the cause of peace; that insatiable greed which is so often hidden under a pretense of public spirit and patriotism, and gives rise to so many private quarrels; a blind and immoderate selfishness, making men seek nothing but their own comfort and advantage, and measure everything by these; no peace in the home, because men have forgotten or neglect their duty; the unity and stability of the family undermined; society, in a word, shaken to its foundations and on the way to ruin.”

Rather than sounding nearly 100 years old, Pius’ words sound as though they were written yesterday. Theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski discusses why we need to pay a bit more attention to this last Sunday in the Church year as we prepare for Advent.

The great Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Tulius Cicero said:

In truth… while I wish to be adorned with every virtue, yet there is nothing which I can esteem more highly than being and appearing grateful. For this one virtue is not only the greatest, but is also the parent of all the other virtues.

The ancients understood—as most moderns don’t—that virtuous living makes us happy. Thus, Cicero argued, gratitude, thanksgiving is the gateway to happiness.

With the celebration of Thanksgiving Day approaching, Wyoming Catholic College President Kyle Washut had this to say about the virtue of thanksgiving.

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, we meet Captain Ahab for the first time long after the Pequod has left Nantucket. “There was,” says Melville’s Ishmael, “an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe."

Dr. Virginia Arbery has taught Moby Dick for years is, once again, reading it with our Wyoming Catholic College seniors many of whom are introduced to the book and Captain Ahab for the first time.

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.

Those are the words of Portia, heroine of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice as she defends her husband’s friend Antonio from the Jewish moneylender Shylock who, Antonio having defaulted on a debt, demands a literal pound of Antonio’s flesh.

Dr. Adam Cooper has been reading The Merchant of Venice with our Wyoming Catholic College juniors.

Once every semester at Wyoming Catholic College, we hold an All-School Seminar. For the fall seminar, a week ago, all of our students and faculty read and discussed Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

Pieper wrote in 1947 in what was a devastated Germany. Everything was damaged or destroyed and workers were a vital necessity at all levels of the culture. It was a world of what he calls "total work," a world he believed would lose its soul without leisure properly understood.

Philosopher Dr. Michael Bolin attended one of student-led seminars and had this to share.

We're regularly told that the only kind of knowing of which we can be certain is "scientific" knowing. What does that mean? How does it apply to the world and our everyday lives.

Mathematician Dr. Scott Olsson has thought and taught a great deal about the questions surrounding science and what it can--and can't--tell us about the world around us. Here are some ideas he brings to his Wyoming Catholic College students.

The theology curricular track at Wyoming Catholic College begins with "Salvation History in the Old Testament." The course is, for the most part, reading the narrative portions of the Old Testament from Genesis to Maccabees.

Dr. Jim Tonkowich has been teaching this freshman course this semester and shares some of the course's content and his own experience encountering the Old Testament with our students.

“Reading,” said Sir Francis Bacon, “maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”

Student academic life at Wyoming Catholic College mirrors Bacon’s comment. Our students read the Great and Good books of our civilization and come to class prepared for what Bacon called “conference.” We would say conversation. And while writing is part of most courses, freshmen take "Trivium 101—Writing Truthfully."

This week's guest, Dr. Tiffany Schubert, finds teaching Trivium 101 a great pleasure.

The Iliad, first of Homer’s great epics, tells the tale of the war between Greece and Troy as it unfolded on the plains outside that ancient city. And the focus of the tale is Achilleus, the greatest warrior on either side who, for most of the book, sits on the sidelines.

Dr. Glenn Arbery is both a scholar and teacher of The Iliad who, once again, is reading the epic with our Wyoming Catholic freshmen.

To graduate from Wyoming Catholic College, students need to spend at least ten weeks in the wilderness. That includes their three-week freshman expedition, a one-week freshman winter trip just after Christmas and six additional weeks over the next three years.

This week is Fall Outdoor Week at the college. Students are rafting, rock climbing, backpacking and fishing, and canyoneering.

Last week I spoke with a senior who told me she was going on a trip she had wanted to do since she heard about it freshman year: rafting the Green River through the treacherous Lodore Canyon in northwest Colorado. And I recalled a podcast I recorded a few years ago with Paul Milligan who had just returned from guiding a trip through that canyon.

Here’s what Paul had to say.

“Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit,” wrote Aristotle at the beginning of his book on ethics, “is considered to aim at some good. Hence the good has rightly been defined as ‘that at which all things aim’.”

We all, Aristotle contends, aim at what we believe is the good. But how do we know what is truly good? And how is it possible as he tells us, that the way to aim at the good has to do with politics?

Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos is reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with our Wyoming Catholic College juniors. Here's what he had to say about the good.

Wyoming Catholic College has a new president, Kyle Washut. It seems fully appropriate that Prof. Washut, a native of Wyoming who has been part of the Wyoming Catholic College project since before the beginning of the college, should now take the helm.

In this podcast, President Washut tells us about the earliest days at the college as well as his hopes and plans for its future.

The college year at Wyoming Catholic College ends with the formality and pomp of graduation as we award degrees and bid another class farewell. The year begins with another, largely-forgotten ceremony equally formal, meaningful, and full of academic pomp: Matriculation in which each new freshmen adds his or her signature to the matricula, the large, leather-bound book that contains the names and signatures of every Wyoming Catholic College student since the school’s inception.

This year’s ceremony, in addition to welcoming new students, President Glenn Arbery welcomed his successor, newly-appointed President Kyle Washut. Here are President Washut’s remarks to the class of 2027.

Nathaniel Hawthorne begins his 1843 short story “The Birthmark,” “In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one.” That is, he married a beautiful woman.

The scientist—actually more of an alchemist—gazed at his beautiful wife one day after they were married and remarked, “‘Georgiana has it never occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?’”

She was beautiful, but not perfect and her birthmark became his and then her obsession. Surely science and technology could make Georgiana perfect.

Dr. Virginia Arbery spoke to the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought about “The Birthmark” as we considered “The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology.” Afterwards we had this conversation.

“A number of people, by now,” wrote Wendell Berry, “have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it.”

As the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought considered the topic “The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology” this past June, we thought we end not only Martin Heidegger, but with agrarian author Wendell Berry, reading two essays: “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” along with letters to the editor and Berry’s responses and “The Use of Energy” where he, like Heidegger, worries that modern technology turns all things including humans and all human things into “standing reserve.”

Dr. Daniel Shields gave the Wyoming School these introductory remarks.

If you ask any philosophy student which philosopher is the most challenging to understand and read, chances are she’ll say, “Martin Heidegger.”

Despite the difficulties inherent in reading Heidegger, as this year’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought considered issues surrounding technology, we read his 1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger, who lived from 1889 to 1976, witnessed a great deal of technological change, much of it extremely harmful. What did it all mean?

Dr. Glenn Arbery guided the participants in the Wyoming School in a give-and-take conversation about Heidegger’s essay with these words.

As Robert Walton and his ship attempted to find a route to the North Pole, they discovered on a small ice flow a dog sled with an exhausted passenger, a man named Viktor Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus tells a cautionary story about technology. Using all the scientific learning and technology he could muster, Viktor Frankenstein literally and figuratively creates a monster—a monster he fears and who pursues him to the death.

Dr. Tiffany Schubert gave this introduction to Shelley’s novel to the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought as we considered The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology.

In addition to being an Anglican priest, Jonathan Swift had a special gift for satire. "Satire," he wrote “is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”

Writing amid the scientific and technological advancements of the early 1700s, Swift was less than convinced that the progress was actually progress and in Gulliver’s Travels he included a voyage to the flying island of Laputa where science and technology come under his satirical gaze.

Dr. Tiffany Schubert gave this introduction to Gulliver’s adventures on Laputa.

Francis Bacon famously noted that, “Knowledge is power.” And the knowledge of science that then leads to the knowledge of technology brings enormous power.

In his book The New Atlantis, published in 1627, the year after his death, Francis Bacon imagines being lost in the Pacific Ocean and landing in an unknown country, one filled with scientific and technological marvels.

Dr. Paul Giesting led the participants in the 2023 Wyoming School of Catholic Though into a discussion of Bacon’s work with this introduction. The text to The New Atlantis can be found here.

…[W]hatever is in motion must be put in motion by another,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae, “If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”

This proof of God’s existence is the first of five that Thomas presents at the beginning of the Summa. And while that seems simple and convincing to most of us, many scholars are certain that the proof is not at all convincing insofar as it relies on Medieval physics and cosmology.

In his new book, Nature and Nature’s God: The Scientific and Philosophical Validity of Aquinas’ Proof of an Unmoved Mover Wyoming Catholic College philosopher Dr. Daniel Shields argues that those scholars should take another look at Thomas’ argument.

In the early 1990s—a mere thirty years ago— America Online was launched into cyberspace and the Hubble Telescope was launched into outer space. These have changed our lives. And it’s an odd parallel to two technological advancements from the Middle Ages—one from 1436 and another from 1608.

In 1436, German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press with movable type. In 1608, an unknown person invented the telescope, an idea that spread as a result of printing and was quickly picked up by Galileo who built his own, studied the heavens, and had his revolutionary findings printed by printing press.

At the Wyoming School of Catholic Though this past June, adult learner listened to this introduction to Early Modern science by Dr. Paul Giesting.

Readings:

C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Chapter 1
Johannes Trithemius, De laude scriptorum, extracts
Francis Bacon, Novum organum, Aphorism 129 of Book I
Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius, abridged
Johannes Kepler, Dioptrics extract from the preface
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, pages 206-212

Genesis 1 tells us, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

As the college’s 2023 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought considered “The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology,” the Scriptures proved a vital guide to invention and evaluation.

At the school, Dr. Tonkowich gave this introduction to seminar discussions of Genesis 1-11 and Exodus 25-40.

Now have we journeyed to a spot of earth Remote-the Scythian wild, a waste untrod. And now, Hephaestus, thou must execute The task our father laid on thee, and fetter This malefactor to the jagged rocks In adamantine bonds infrangible; For thine own blossom of all forging fire He stole and gave to mortals; trespass grave For which the Gods have called him to account, That he may learn to bear Zeus' tyranny And cease to play the lover of mankind.

Those words set the scene at the beginning of Aeschylus’ play “Prometheus Bound.” It’s the god Prometheus who stole fire from Hephaestus and gave it along with the technology to use fire to mortals, a race Zeus, newly crowned as chief god, intended to destroy.

Dr. Virginia Arbery gave the 2023 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought this introduction to our seminar conversations about “Prometheus Bound.” You can find the text of the play here.

In the Phaedrus, Plato wrote about writing that, “it will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories, they will trust to external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

It seems almost beyond believing that as we worry about technologies such as artificial intelligence and smart phones, Plato considered and rejected the new technology of writing things down on paper. It’s evidence that for millennia, we humans have been inventing new things and debating about whether or not they are or are not useful—or even safe.

At the 2023 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, the college’s adult week, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos gave us this introduction to our readings from Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch.

Readings:

Sophocles, Antigone 334–375
Plato, Phaedrus 274c–275e
Plato, Laws 796e–800b
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.2
Aristotle, Politics 1.4, 2.8, 7.11
Plutarch, Marcellus ¶¶14–19

Hephaestus was the Greek god of technology. Unlike Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and the others who were unspeakably beautiful and strong, Hephaistos talks in Homer’s Iliad about “my own brazen-faced mother, who wanted to hid me, for being lame.”

Wyoming Catholic College recently held our adult learning week, The Wyoming School of Catholic Thought. Our topic was “The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology.”

Dr. Glenn Arbery, the college president, opened up the week with these words about Hephaestus and techne from chapter 18 of The Iliad. The book can be found here.

Like all graduating seniors, Wyoming Catholic College seniors look forward to baccalaureate robes, degrees, and moving their mortarboards tassels from, right to left. But much more than the typical academic regalia, our seniors look forward to being awarded that most coveted graduation emblem, a black Wyoming Catholic College Stetson.

Those cowboy hats are the symbol of their four years of exercising mind, body, and spirit in a Wyoming Catholic College education. College dean, Mr. Kyle Washut explains how the tradition began.

The 2023 Wyoming Catholic College graduation speaker and recipient of the college Sedes Sapientiae award was Most Reverend Samuel J. Aquila, the archbishop for the Archdiocese of Denver.

His words were realistic about the challenges we face as a culture and as a Church, but there were nonetheless words filled with hope. After the graduation ceremony, I expressed my gratitude to him saying, “Thank you. I needed that.” And I suspect we all need what he had to say.

Here are Archbishop Aquila’s words to the Class of 2023 and the rest of us.

Each year the Wyoming Catholic College senior class chooses one of its members to deliver a speech at graduation. The Class of 2023 chose Miss Emma Hermanson.

Before coming to Wyoming Catholic College, Emma Hermanson spent her high school years at a classical school in Colorado. At Wyoming Catholic, her favorite part of the curriculum was the humanities track, feeding her abiding love of literature. After graduation, Emma will be getting married and beginning her work as a high school literature and writing teacher in the fall.

Here is what Emma had to say at graduation.

For information on The 2023 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought click here.

This past Saturday, May 13 began what we’ve come to call our graduation triduum, three days of celebrating the achievements of ther Wyoming Catholic College Class of 2023.

Graduation weekend begins with the senior dinner on Saturday evening—seniors, faculty, and staff only. Monday was Commencement. And Sunday, after Baccalaureate Mass we held The President’s Dinner at which college president, Dr. Glenn Arbery, addressed seniors their parents, families, and friends along with the faculty and staff.

Here’s what Dr. Arbery had to say.

BENEDICK But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none.

BEATRICE A dear happiness to women: they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.

BENEDICK God keep your ladyship still in that mind! so some gentleman or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face.

William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” has it all: heroes, villains, loyalty and betrayal, hatred and love, serious crime and silly sidelights. At one point it veers dangerously close to utter tragedy only to come right again with true love conquering even the coldest hearts.

I asked Dr. Tiffany Schubert to begin giving us an overview of the play.

There was a time not too long ago when every church had a church choir. Ordinary people knew how to sing parts and often tackled difficult pieces of music with wonderful results.

At Wyoming Catholic College, the choir loft in our oratory and, during special masses such as our upcoming graduation mass, the choir loft at Holy Rosary Church here in Lander are crowded places. Our students love to sing.

And this spring semester they have the added inspiration of a new choir director, our Composer in Residence, Paul Jernberg. Mr. Jernberg is also the founder and director of the Magnificat Institute of Sacred Music.

“We know,” St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, “that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.”

Those words from St. Paul can and should comfort us. Nothing happens in our lives or our world that God does not intend to bring about good for His children. His providential care surrounds us. On the other hand, terrible things happen in our lives and in the world around us. Does God will evil? Allow evil? Maybe evil is not what we think it is?

Dr. Michael Bolin has been reading St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae with our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores considering, among other things, that “all things are governed by divine providence.”

In almost every walk of life and vocation, the ability to express yourself orally with clarity, precision, and persuasiveness are vital. That’s obvious for priests, teachers, salespeople, politicians, and lawyers, but consider that engineers, managers, administrators, builders, doctors, at-home moms, and…well, you name it… make presentations and proposals to individuals and groups.

This semester Dr. Virginia Arbery and Dr. Tonkowich each have two sections of sophomores for Trivium 202 and sat down for this conversation.

Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1889) is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the Victorian Era though, oddly, the Victorian Era never read Hopkins. While, imitating his father, he wrote poetry while growing up, he burned his early poems when he decided to become—of all things—a Roman Catholic priest, having been raised High Church Anglican and he wrote no poetry for years.

His later poetry, the poems we have today, were only published thirty years after his death.

Wyoming Catholic College President, Dr. Glenn Arbery suggested Hopkins' poem "Spring" would be a good one to consider during this Octave of Easter.

St. Augustine of Hippo who lived AD 354 – 430 delivered 124 lectures moving verse-by-verse through the entire the Gospel of John. This being Holy Week, here is lecture 116 in which Augustine discussed Jesus’ final condemnation by Pontius Pilate in John 19:1-16.

This is what St. Augustine had to say.

The text is copyrighted by d by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Papal biographer and scholar George Weigel is fond of saying that for Catholics, “stuff matters.” Stuff like our physical bodies, bread, wine, water, incense, candles, bells, linen, altars, and ashes. Catholic Christianity is deeply incarnational, rooted firmly in God’s good Creation. And that rooting shows itself most clearly when we worship, that is, in the liturgy of the Mass.

Fr. Romano Guardini was one of the towering Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century who for all his erudition, wrote a simple little book entitled Sacred Signs in which he gently and simply explained this connection between material and the inner world of the spirit.

The book is a favorite of theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski and a wonderful book to read during these last weeks of Lent.

This week the Wyoming Catholic College campus is deserted. Our dorms are empty. The kitchen and dining hall are silent. It’s Spring Outdoor week.

A Wyoming Catholic College education begins with three weeks backpacking in the mountains of Wyoming. After that, they spend an additional seven weeks in the backcountry, a week at a time during our fall and spring Outdoor Weeks.

Why? Dr. Tom Zimmer, Assistant Professor of Leadership and Outdoor Education and Director of the college's Experiential Leadership Program and COR Expeditions answers that question.

Whether it’s fermions and bosoms or air, earth, fire, and water or nothing but water, the question “What is the world?” has a long history and there have been many answers.

Wyoming Catholic College freshmen discover the many answers in Philosophy 102, going on this semester. Dr. Henry Zepeda has been teaching them the philosophy of nature and the material world and I asked him why student’s journey through philosophy begins here.

Defeated in the attempt to war against God, fallen from Heaven, chained in the fiery muck of Hell, Milton’s Satan nonetheless declares:

What though the field be lost?All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,And study of revenge, immortal hate,And courage never to submit or yield:And what is else not to be overcome? (I.1-5-109)The Romantics in the nineteenth century saw Satan as the real hero of Paradise Lost, a mighty warrior who will not except defeat, will not apologize for his rebellion, insists on fighting on against impossible odds, and asserts his inner convictions, his inner identity no matter what.

Others aren’t so sure.

Prof. Adam Cooper has been teaching Paradise Lost to our Wyoming Catholic College juniors, debating, among other things, the character of Satan and his demon hoards.

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place.

Thus begins Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s last and arguably his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Recounting the story of Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons, Alexey, Ivan, and Dmitri, Dostoyevsky addresses suffering, the existence of God, good and evil, crime and punishment, worldliness and holiness.

Dr. Tiffany Schubert and our Wyoming Catholic College seniors have just finished reading the book.

Exactly 13 years ago today, Pope Benedict XVI noted in his Angelus address, “Lent is like a long ‘retreat’ in which to re-enter oneself and listen to God's voice in order to overcome the temptations of the Evil One and to find the truth of our existence. It is a time, we may say, of spiritual ‘training’ in order to live alongside Jesus not with pride and presumption but rather by using the weapons of faith: namely prayer, listening to the Word of God and penance.”

On February 21, 2010, the day Pope Benedict made that remark, Lent had already begun. For us, today is Shrove Tuesday, the even of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of this season of spiritual retreat.

Fr. Godfrey Okwunga, who grew up in Nigeria, is Wyoming Catholic College’s Latin chaplain who had this to say about Lent.

“As a modern man,” wrote Wyoming Catholic College senior, Aidan Wood,” the paths to happiness are seemingly endless, and endlessly confusing. However, there is one simple path that guarantees man’s mission: the path of discipline.”

We all know the feeling: While trying to lose some weight, you pass the donuts someone put in the break room. Just one won’t hurt. Reading St. Thomas Aquinas is a great idea, but I’m tired in the evening and TV is an easier option. The alarm goes off, but well… there’s a snooze button.

Our guest, Mr. Aidan Wood, wrote his senior thesis and oration on the topic of discipline.

Last week was orations week at Wyoming Catholic College, a highlight of our life together as a college. In the fall, our seniors write a thesis. Then in the spring semester, each senior presents his or her thesis in a half-hour oration before fielding a half hour of questions.

Senior Abigail O’Brien’s thesis title was: “The Age of Gnosticism: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and Human Identity in the Digital Age.” Miss O’Brien is our guest this week.

St. Augustine was a prominent teacher of rhetoric in Roman North Africa and in Italy. Despite his success, he was restless, constantly casting about for what was true until he found his rest through faith in Christ. A great sinner, we learn in his Confessions who became a great saint.

Dr. Daniel Shields is attending sophomore humanities this semester and has been reading through Confessions with our students and he shares with us what he finds so compelling about the book.

Lola Shub and a group of her friends at Essex Street Academy in Manhattan read Into the Wildabout an adventurer who died while trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. As a result, she told The New York Times, “We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.”

Lola Shub is a member of the Luddite Club, students who eschew technology—including smart phones—for the sake of other, better pursuits such as meeting together in a park, drawing, painting, and reading books included Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.”

Whether or not “Luddite Clubs” will become a social trend among teens has yet to be seen, but it does seem that the Wyoming Catholic College technology policy is, in fact, a good that’s ahead of its time.

As technologies and the needs of our students change, we update the policy and Dr. Kent Lasnoski has been at the center of recent revisions.

“Usually when I debate on this topic,” said pro-life advocate Helen Alvare, “I feel like I’m behind a podium speaking French and the other person is behind a podium speaking Finnish. There’s no common ground.”

Part of the reason there is no common ground in the abortion debate is that our pro-abortion family and friends don’t understand our arguments and we don’t understand theirs.

Wyoming Catholic College philosopher, Dr. Michael Bolin allows his students to puzzle over what might be the best philosophical argument for abortion rights: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” published in the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1971—about 18 months before Roe v. Wade was decided.

At a banquet for a local pregnancy care center the speaker noted the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s true and thanks be to God. But, the speaker suggested, quoting Winston Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” That is, the battle rages on and could be uglier than ever.

With that in mind, this week and next will focus on the theology and philosophy of life beginning this week as theologian, Dr. Jeremy Holmes, discusses the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

All of Lander including our Wyoming Catholic College Students love Sinks Canyon. The natural beauty is breathtaking and on any given day regardless of the season, you can meet people hiking, rock climbing, fishing, camping, birding, and mountain biking. Once a year, however, you’ll be able to see another unexpected activity: processing, worshipping, and the blessing of the waters.

Our guest this week, Wyoming Catholic College Professor Kyle Washut, reflects on this great feast.

After a month of “The Christmas Season” which was actually Advent, it’s finally the Christmas Season allowing us the leisure to reflect on the Nativity of Christ.

Poet, novelist, and Wyoming Catholic College president, Dr. Glenn Arbery helps us reflect on the birth of Christ using the poem "Nativity" by John Donne.

Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” may be the best-known poem in America today. For many it may be the only-known poem besides lyrics to one pop song or another. We are not a poetic people though that was not always true. Americans in the past had a huge appetite for poetry—an appetite we can recover.

Of course, Moore’s paean to St. Nick is hardly the only Christmas poetry in the world. Christians have been writing poems about the First Coming of Christ as a babe in Bethlehem for two thousand years.

As a Christmas gift to you, our listeners, on this podcast Wyoming Catholic College students share from that treasury of Christmas poetry.

When Aeneas visits the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, he sees great heroes who have died and great heroes yet to be born.

Here is Caesar, and all the offspring

of Julus destined to live under the pole of heaven.

This is the man, this is him, whom you so often hear

promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of the Deified,

who will make a Golden Age again in the fields

where Saturn once reigned, and extend the empire beyond

the Libyans and the Indians....”

It’s no surprise that Virgil wrote such extravagant praise of Caesar Augustus into his epic. After all, Caesar Augustus gave him the job of creating the founding myth of the Roman Empire that had supplanted the Roman Republic.

As he has been teaching The Aeneid to our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos has been thinking a great deal about that transition.

While Martin Luther believed that Mary, “is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin—something exceedingly great,” there may be no other Catholic doctrine as contentious as the immaculate conception as we talk with our Protestant friends. They can’t imagine and I wonder how many of our Catholic friends can’t imagine either.

This Thursday, December 8 is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and Wyoming Catholic College theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski joins us to shed a bit of light on the subject.

Ivan Turgenev began his novel, Fathers and Sons, with a father, Nicholai Kirsanov, as he awaits the arrival of his son, Arcady, who after years of study in St. Petersburg, is paying a visit to the family estate. When Arcady arrives, he has with him his best friend and mentor, Evgeny Bazarov, a medical student--and nihilist.

Bazarov is skeptical about everything with the exception of science. It is a position that played well in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, but which seems a bit out of place in farm country.

Dr. Tiffany Schubert has taught the novel to our Wyoming Catholic College juniors and tells us a bit more about the book.

While there may be people in this world who don’t care one way or another about happiness, it’s safe to say that most people often say to themselves, “I just want to be happy. Is that too much to ask?”

The question is how to achieve happiness if “achieve” is even the right word.

University of Texas Austin Professor of Government and Philosophy, Dr. J Budziszewski, takes on that question in a new book, How and How Not to Be Happy.

Dr. Budziszewski lectured at Wyoming Catholic College on the topic of that new book and was kind enough to join us for this podcast.

Ancient Sparta in the public imagination has long been an armed camp. It’s a city organized like an army to train all boys to be soldiers and all women to be hard as nails. And Spartans, we’re told, always fight to the death as they did at Thermopylae.

Dr. Stephen Hodkinson begs to differ. Dr. Hodkinson is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham. He is co-organiser of the International Sparta Seminar and founder of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies. And in 2010 he was awarded Honorary Citizenship of modern Sparta for his contributions to Spartan history.

He is also in Lander visiting his son, Wyoming Catholic College professor Christopher Hodkinson and kindly tells us about Ancient Sparta.

Articles by Stephen Hodkinson can be found here.

In Markmaker the new science fiction novel by Mary Jessica Wood (Wyoming Catholic College Class of 2019), tattoos are not optional. They define identity by commemorating birth, ancestry, accomplishments—even crimes. Though sworn always to record the truth, one tattoo artist tattoos a lie resulting in the banishment of an innocent man. He’s devastated at his dishonesty, but that leads him….

Perhaps it would be best to let Mary Jessica Woods tell us more about the story.

To order Markmaker by Mary Jessica Woods, click here.

Each year on November 1, we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints, remembering those brothers and sisters in Christ who lives demonstrated heroic virtue and faith. “The Saints,” said Pope Francis, “were not superhuman. They were people who loved God in their hearts, and who shared this joy with others.” And he goes on to say, “To be saints is not a privilege for a few, but a vocation for everyone.”

Perhaps by happy providence, perhaps by cunning design, back in 2017, Wyoming Catholic College professor Kyle Washut was teaching the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium to our seniors just in time for All Saints Day. Here is what he had to say.

Last week on the After-Dinner Scholar, theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski talked with us about the story of Israel in the Old Testament book of Exodus. This week we’ll continue the conversation about Exodus only we’ll jump ahead of Moses by three thousand years.

Within the Bible, the story of the Exodus, chronicling how God delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt lent a strong sense of identity to the American colonists, the founders, and African-Americans, and others.

Dr. Virginia Arbery has an abiding interest in story of the Exodus and our American imagination.

While our English versions of the Old Testament call the book “Exodus,” which means “leaving,” the Hebrew name is the first word of the text, shemoth, “names.” “These are the names,” and those names are the sons of Jacob who God renamed Israel. They and their families—a total of seventy people—escaped famine in the land of Canaan, finding a home with the long-lost son of Jacob, Joseph who, sold into slavery, became Pharaoh’s second-in-command.

Initially they lived well and over the decades those seventy became thousands. Then we read, “there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” and he and his people were afraid of these hoards of foreigners. So the king, Pharoah enslaved them. Dr. Kent Lasnoski has been reading Exodus with our Wyoming Catholic College freshmen and had this to say about the book.

When Wyoming Catholic College sophomores take Theology 201: The Mystery of the Trinity, they’re typically surprised that before diving into the theology of the Trinity, they’re up to their ears in philosophy. God exists. God is unmovable. God is eternal. God is necessary. God is everlasting. God is simple.

Such considerations need to come first since without them, theology can lose the moorings it needs in the intellect and in the world as it is.

To help us understand the place of philosophy in our theology, our guest this week is the professor who teaches Theology 201: The Mystery of the Trinity, theologian Dr. Jeremy Holmes.

Books Recommended by Dr. Holmes

Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas Institute Edition)
Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence by Michael Augros
Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker by F. C. Copleston
Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide) by Edward Feser
A Summa of the Summa by Thomas Aquinas and Peter Kreeft

Summa Theologiae: Complete Set

Studying the lives of men and women is complicated, but it is from that study that we see vice and virtue and the end results of each, we learn of honor and dishonor, sacrifice and selfishness, self-discipline and dissipation.

The Greek Platonist and priest of Apollo at Delphi, Plutarch understood the project of instruction by writing the lives of great Roman and Greeks.

Dr. Tiffany Schubert has been teaching Plutarch’s Lives with the Wyoming Catholic College sophomores.

Geoffrey Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales describing the beauty of April and the countryside coming back to life. It is the time, he tells us, “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.” “And specially,” he adds, “from every shires ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende.”

A small company of pilgrims forms and, as the go, each tells a tale.

Like the Samaritan woman Jesus spoke with in John chapter four, The Wife of Bath says she has had five husbands not to mention “other companye in youthe.” She is a wealthy woman who had been on pilgrimage as far as Jerusalem. She is also rather fond of sex and knows quite a bit about marriage.

Prof. Adam Cooper has been reading The Canterbury Tales with Wyoming Catholic College juniors and shared these thoughts.

"History," commented Harvard University historian, Dr. James Hankins, "is a road to sanity."

"Points of Light: The Church in the 19th Century," the upcoming free, six-week distance learning class with Dr. Jim Tonkowich, is intended to set listeners on that road to sanity in our increasingly insane era.

Why the nineteenth century? The Catholic Church at the dawn of the nineteenth century looked as though she was on the ropes at best and, at worst, down for the count. But God had other plans.

The course begins Thursday, September 29. To register for this free course, click here.

“The great difference between the real statesman and the pretender,” wrote Edmund Burke, “is, that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts on expedience; the other acts on enduring principles and for immortality.”

Eighteenth century British thinker and Member of Parliament, Edmund Burke is one of six politicians highlighted by Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney in his new book The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation.

Dr. Mahoney, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Senior Writer at Law and Liberty, and professor emeritus at Assumption University delivered a lecture last Friday at Wyoming Catholic College and was kind enough to record this interview.

On the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River, a group of young men and women were wading with nets. Others sprawled out on the ground with Petrie dishes and sketchbooks. It's Field Science at Wyoming Catholic College.

What is field science? To quote our website: “this course is an introduction to natural science through field study that puts students in direct contact with the local natural environment. Through the direct experience and methodical observation of the heavens, geological formations, flora, and fauna, observational skills are sharpened and a sense of wonder at nature and natural history is cultivated. Students spend much time outdoors, drawing and recording data in sketchbooks.”

Dr. Stanley Grove has been out in the field with multiple freshmen field science groups and reflects on what the students have learned.

At Wyoming Catholic college, “Ours is an education of immersion: immersion in the Western tradition, immersion in the beauty and challenges of the wilderness, immersion in the treasures of our Catholic spiritual heritage.” Last Monday fifty-six freshmen, back from their 21-day backpacking expedition, began their immersion at Wyoming Catholic College.

It is customary, as you might imagine, for the college president, Dr. Glenn Arbery to address the new freshmen. Here is what Dr. Arbery had to say last week to the Wyoming Catholic College class of 2026.

The 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought featured readings on the topic “Mortality and Eternity” including Pope Benedict XVI's 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi.

“The belief that love can reach into the afterlife,” wrote Pope Benedict, “that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today.”

Dr. Michael Bolin gave the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought participants this introduction to Spe Salvi.

In his essay, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” Dr. Leon Kass asks, “If life is good and more is better, should we not regard death as a disease and try to cure it?”

While “curing” death may seem far-fetched, the so-called trans-human project seeks to do just that.

Kass, an Orthodox Jew, wrote the essay for those with no or with little religion. Wyoming Catholic College philosopher, Dr. Daniel Shields gave the participants in this year’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought this introduction to Kass’ essay before we broke into seminar groups.

The Book of Hebrews 9:27 reminds us, “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment.”

St. Robert Bellarmine, had, it seems, a congregation that had, for the most part, forgotten that truth. Their lives were focused on this world, their concern for death and judgment weak, their hearts cold to the things of God and to their faith.

As a good pastor, they needed to be warned. Bellarmine preached four sermons on the four last things: death, judgment, hell, and heaven. At the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, we read the first of the four, Bellarmine’s sermon on death.

Dr. Scott Olsson gave us this introduction before we broke up into seminar groups to discuss Bellarmine’s words.

In his poem The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot wrote:

“What the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

In Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, we read about encounters with those who have died. Odysseus seeks wisdom from the prophet Teiresias and his mother, Anikleia (Odyssey 11.1-224). Aeneas meets his father Anchises, parent and prophet (Aeneid 6.739-983). And Dante holds a long conversation in Heaven with his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida who also assumes the role of prophet (Paradiso 15-17).

What can we learn from these fictional encounters with the dead? Dr. Glenn Arbery gave this introduction at the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought.

Author Ann-Marie MacDonald noted, “It’s important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.”

In “Go Down, Moses,” the final chapter of his novel Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner tells us the story about a funeral. The deceased is a young man executed in Chicago for murder. Home is back in Mississippi and his grandmother who raised him is determined to bring him back home to bury him. For that she’ll need a great deal of help.

Dr. Virginia Arbery gave the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought this introduction to Faulkner’s story.

Antigone’s brother Eteocles fought for Thebes and King Creon. Her other brother, Polyneices, fought against Creon and thus against Thebes. In battle they killed each other. Creon buried Eteocles with full military honor. But regarding Polyneices, has ordered, “No one shall bury him, no one mourn for him, / But his body must lie in the fields, a sweet treasure / For carrion birds to find as they search for food.”

His sister, Antigone, won’t stand for it.

Sophocles’ tragedy, “Antigone” was one of the readings as the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought considered “Mortality and Eternity.” In the play Antigone risks and loses her life over the filial duty of burying the dead.

Before we broke up into seminar groups to discuss the play, Prof. Adam Cooper gave us this introduction.

I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.

Those words are from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. Are they the thoughts of a bitter cynic? Of a cranky, world-weary old man? Or encouraging words of wisdom?

When Dr. Jim Tonkowich introduced the book at the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, he argued for the latter: Ecclesiastes contains encouraging words of wisdom, words our culture, so self-focused and materialistic, so forgetful of death, desperately needs to hear.

In the big building of the law courts, during a break in hearing the case of the Melvinskys, the members and the prosecutor met in Ivan Yegorovich Shehek's office, and the conversation turned to the famous Krasovsky case. Fyodor Vassilievich became heated demonstrating non-jurisdiction, Ivan Yegorovich stood his ground; as for Pyotr Ivanovich, not having entered into the argument in the beginning, he took no part in it and was looking through the just-delivered [newspaper].

“Gentlemen,” he said, “Ivan Ilyich is dead!”

Thus begins Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych, the first reading for the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought. It’s intriguing that the story begins with Ivan Ilych’s death, recounting his life and his dying as a flashback after we hear of his funeral.

At the Wyoming School, Wyoming Catholic President, Dr. Glenn Arbery introduced Tolstoy’s novella this way.

“Teach us to number out days,” sang the psalmist, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

This past June 12-17, the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought convened here in Lander. Adult learners came from California, Texas, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and elsewhere to study great texts on the theme “Mortality and Eternity.”

Our Wyoming Catholic College faculty led the sessions comprised of a short lecture introducing the reading followed by seminars.

This summer, The After-Dinner Scholar will bring you those lectures. And while they are helpful on their own, they will also serve as an introduction to your own study of the texts in the curriculum.

We began Sunday, June 12 with an after-dinner lecture to introduce the week. That night Dr. Jim Tonkowich spoke about Psalm 90.

NUNC, Sancte, nobis Spiritus, unum Patri cum Filio, dignare promptus ingeri nostro refusus pectori.

Now, O Holy Spirit (given) for us

One with the Father (and) the Son

condescend to enter [us] at once

(you) having been poured into our breasts

Wyoming Catholic College students study Latin during their freshman and sophomore years. From there they move to two years of Latin reading groups. One of the groups this last semester read Latin hymns including Nunc Sancte nobis Spiritus.

Prof. Eugene Hamilton—better known simply as Magister—led the reading group along with Dr. Travis Dziad. Prof. Hamilton is our guest on this podcast.

The Wyoming Catholic College seniors who graduated this past May 23, all took the same courses, read the same books, and received a Batchelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. What does that mean and why does it make a difference?

Our graduation speaker was Dr. R. R. Reno. Dr. Reno, the editor of the journal First Things and author of numerous books, is a keen and well-read observer of our modern culture and politics. Here's what he had to say to the graduates, parents, and the college community about the world, the future, and the liberal arts.

Each year the faculty of Wyoming Catholic College asks the senior class to select one of their number to speak for the class at graduation. The Class of 2022 chose Mr. Andrew Russell. The result was quite remarkable. Andrew's presence, content, delivery, and vision reminded his listeners of the mission of Wyoming Catholic College and how, to a great extent, we are fulfilling that mission.

The night before Wyoming Catholic College's graduation exercises, we celebrate our senior with a formal dinner, The President's Dinner, which includes seniors, their families and friends, as well as college faculty and staff. At the dinner, the college president addresses the seniors for one last time. President Glenn Arbery had this to say to the Class of 2022.

O last of Rome, among small-minded citizens,

The bickering children of your mother’s house,

Your gaze was calm and grave and kind

As is the glowing lamp

Upon the holy ikon’s deep-set brow.

Those lines are from the latest issue of the Wyoming Catholic College publication Integritas. They are the beginning of a poem called “Ode to Constantine XI” by Prof. Adam Cooper. While this podcast has featured any number of conversations about poem, it is a rare treat to feature a poem along with the poet.

To read "Ode to Constantine XI in Integritas click this link.

A point is that of which there is no part.
And a line is a length without breadth.
And the extremities of a line are points.
A straight-line is (any) one which lies evenly with points on itself.
And a surface is that which has length and breadth only.

Those five definitions are the first five of twenty-three that form the introduction to Euclid’s Elements. They’re the things our second semester freshmen must know before beginning Proposition #1, the start of a mathematical journey that will last through fall semester sophomore year.

Dr. Henry Zepeda, who regularly teaches Euclid, discusses this seminal mathematician and The Elements before commenting on Euclid’s understanding of proportions.

In his book, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, Fr. Michael Ward writes that Lewis in The Abolition of Man, “defends the objectivity of value, pointing to the universal moral ecology that all great philosophical and religious traditions have acknowledged as self-evident.” Self-evident, that is, until just recently.

Today the idea that there might be a “universal moral ecology” seems unthinkable. My truth is my truth; your truth is your truth and good is whatever I define good to be.

Believing that ideas have consequences and having an ability to reason from premises to conclusions, C. S. Lewis saw the danger and in The Abolition of Man issued a firm warning.

Dr. Travis Dziad recently taught The Abolition of Man in his sophomore leadership course.

The eighth circle of Dante’s Hell are the Malabolge, the evil ditches. In the eighth evil ditch false counselors are punished, trapped in flames. Dante the pilgrim asks Virgil his guide about one flame in particular Virgil answers, "Within this flame find torment Ulysses and Diomedes.”

Ulysses is also known as Odysseus who, after conquering Troy, wandered ten years trying to get home to his kingdom of Ithaca, to his father, Laertes, to his beloved wife, Penelope, and to their son Telemachus. After he finally returns to all that was dear to him, Dante tells us, Odysseus succumbed to wanderlust "to gain experience of the world and learn about man’s vices, and his worth."

The voyage did not end well. Death and Hell take him. But did he deserve to be in Hell? Was his sin really as great as all that?

Prof. Adam Cooper has been teaching Dante helps us understand.

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee O let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me. These lines are from George Herbert's poem "Easter Wings." Herbert, a contemporary of William Shakespeare and John Milton, lived 1593 to 1633. In addition to being a poet he was a Church of England priest and theologian. Wyoming Catholic College president Dr. Glenn Arbery has long been an admirer of Herbert’s metaphysical poetry including “Easter Wings” and a poem simply entitled “Easter.”

There was a time, remarked twentieth century theologian Karl Rahner, when people were “full of life’s joy, satisfied and carefree, and they celebrated Mardi Gras in the streets and laughed the laughter that still came from the heart. Therefore, they could presumably experience a brief period of recollection, of contemplative seriousness, and of ascetic restraint from life’s luxuries as a beneficial change from everyday life and for the good of the soul.” In such a world, Lent and Holy Week made sense. Dr. Jim Tonkowich asks, "Do they still make sense?"

This is spring Outdoor Week at Wyoming Catholic College and as a result our campus is a bit of a ghost town. Students are spending the week canyoneering, canoeing, rock climbing, hiking, biking, horseback riding, learning to hunt, and producing Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”

As a college, we take educating the bodies of our students as seriously as we take educating their minds and spirits. That’s why, as we approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week, we are rebroadcasting an interview with Dr. Kent Lasnoski about Romano Guardini's book Sacred Signs and the importance of the physical in our spiritual lives.

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.”

The quotation comprises the first sentences of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick, a vast, sprawling work that is about, among other things, whaling.

Dr. Elizabeth Reyes, a faculty member at Thomas Aquinas College in California was our guest lecturer here at Wyoming Catholic college in March. Her dissertation was titled: “Ishmael’s Cetological Quest: A Progression of Imagination in Melville’s Moby-Dick.” Dr. Reyes was kind enough to join us for this podcast.

To hear Dr. Reyes lecture, "A Gentle Joyfulness," visit the Wyoming Catholic College website.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:26-28)

The 2022 Solemnity of the Annunciation falls on this coming Friday, March 25. That day we remember Gabriel’s visit to Mary, his message, and her response: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And so Mary became the Mother of God and, as she sang in the Magnificat, “all generations will call me blessed.”

Monsignor Daniel Seiker is our Latin rite chaplain here a Wyoming Catholic College tells us about this great holy day for us.

The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides tells us that as the Peloponnesian War broke out, “The Athenians thus long lived scattered over Attica in independent townships. Even after the centralization of Theseus, old habit still prevailed; and from the early times down to the present war most Athenians still lived in the country with their families and households, and were consequently not at all inclined to move now, especially as they had only just restored their establishments after the Median invasion. Deep was their trouble and discontent at abandoning their houses and the hereditary temples of the ancient constitution, and at having to change their habits of life and to bid farewell to what each regarded as his native city.”

The Peloponnesian War, in fact, changed life not only in Athens, but in Sparta and the rest of Greece forever. Strong and vibrant after defeating the Medes in the early fifth century BC, their conflict with one another—431-405 BC—brought weakness and eventually conquest by Philip of Macedonia and later the Romans.

It's not just a fascinating story, but one that may well speak to us today. Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos has been teaching Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

In addition to Euclidian geometry, Thomistic theology, Enlightenment philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, epics, novels, and essays, an important part of a Wyoming Catholic College liberal arts education is leadership. After two weeks of the three-week backpacking expedition that serves as their initiation to the college, our freshmen are on their own. The upperclassmen leaders keep watch, but are no longer part of the freshman groups as they travel, set up camp, cook, pray, discuss, and sleep. We expect—and we get—solid leadership.

Yes, but what does that have to do with the liberal arts? As Dr. Travis Dziad, an alumnus of the college, teaches leadership, and outdoor education at the college as well as theology he is well equipped to offer some insights.

Once each semester at Wyoming Catholic College we hold All-School Seminar. Our entire community reads the same work and the student body and faculty are divided into seminar groups led by our seniors. Last week the whole college discussed Robert Bolt’s play about St. Thomas More, “A Man for All Seasons.”

More, who along with King Henry VII was a staunch defender of the Catholic faith and a favorite of the king who eventually made him Lord Chancellor. Then Henry, wanting to divorce Catherine of Aragorn, declared himself the head of the Church in England. More quit his high post hoping to avoid conflict with the king. It didn’t work.

This week, Prof. Kyle Washut discusses about All-School Seminars and “A Man for All Seasons.”

Regarding freedom, First Things editor Dr. R. R. Reno writes, “It’s a very American word. But do we understand freedom’s promise? To what end does God liberate the Israelites? What is the freedom for which Christ has set us free? Is an unhindered man a free man? Can I remain free even when held in captivity?”

For most people today, freedom means the ability to do as I wish, when I wish, as I wish, and with whomever I wish. Freedom is the sovereign self doing as it pleases. The ancient Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus sounding extremely contemporary asked, “Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?” Then, answering his own questions, he responded, “Nothing else.”

This coming March 25 and 26 in Phoenix, Arizona First Things is sponsoring an intellectual retreat on the topic of freedom. Members of the Wyoming Catholic College faculty including Dr. Virginia Arbery will serve as seminar leaders. Dr. Arbery is our guest this week.

For more information on the First Things Intellectual Retreat on Freedom, follow this link.

Since at least 1891 when Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Catholic Church has debated the relationship between capital and labor. It has been and continues to be a complex and somewhat contentious one.

Not at all deterred by that, Wyoming Catholic College senior, Mr. Thomas Sponseller delivered a fine senior oration two weeks ago on the topic “Catholics in a Capitalist World: Understanding Capitalism with Catholic Social Teaching.”

One of the highlights of the academic year here at Wyoming Catholic College is Senior Oration Week. During the fall semester, each senior prepares a thesis, a major research paper on a topic of his or her choosing. Then early in the spring semester, each senior presents the thesis as a half-hour oration with an additional half hour for questions—first from a faculty panel and then from the audience.

Last week was Oration Week 2022 and our seniors did not disappoint.

Miss MaryAnne Speiss used her thesis and oration to explore a question that had been on her mind throughout her four years at Wyoming Catholic College. Her title was, “Ancient ‘Goodness’—Does God Hate It, Tolerate It, or Demand It?: Nietzsche and Lewis on Good, Evil, and Spirited Christianity.”

“It is a good rule,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in-between.”

About three years ago, Dr. Jason Baxter taught the distance learning course “The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis” after which he turned his lectures into chapters for the book The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind which will be available this March 15th—though you may, of course pre-order it today.

We tend to forget that in addition to being a popular novelist and apologist, Lewis’s day job was professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Oxford University and later at Cambridge University. That is, he was first and foremost a scholar and his fiction and apologetic works are tied more tightly to his scholarship than most of his readers realize.

To order Dr. Baxter's book, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis click here.

The story goes that the church sacristan overheard Thomas Aquinas speaking in prayer before the crucifix. Thomas was asking whether all he had written about the Christian faith was correct. “You have spoken well of me, Thomas,” came the audible answer, “What is your reward to be.” Thomas replied, “Non nisi te, Domini. Nothing but You, Lord.”

On January 28 we celebrate the Feast Day of St. Thomas Aquinas and while most Catholics know that he has a special place in the Church, we may not appreciate how great a place he occupies.

Dr. Michael Bolin has been studying Thomas Aquinas at least a far back as his undergraduate days at Thomas Aquinas College. This week, he'll give us a kind of crash course in the life and teaching of The Angelic Doctor.

Not long after Wyoming Catholic College began, students organized Cowboys for Life in order to speak for the protection of the unborn. Cowboys for Life has organized trips to Marches for Life in Denver and San Francisco. They spent hours praying at the corner of Second and Main here in Lander during 40 Days for Life. And on November 30, they organized an all-night prayer vigil on the eve of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court about Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that may be the end of Roe v. Wade.

The current president of Cowboys for Life is Wyoming Catholic College junior Jill Cook who begins by telling us how she became active in the pro-life movement.

It’s January in Wyoming. The weather is cold, the days are short, and we have the pleasure of planning the annual Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, June 12-17, when adult learners from across the country will gather here in Lander to enjoy something of what our students experience during their years at Wyoming Catholic College.

In past years participants in the Wyoming School looked at friendship, courage, science and imagination, and Shakespeare’s Rome. This year our topic is “Mortality and Eternity: The Question of Death.”

“What are you doing, O Magi?” asked St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Do you adore a little Babe, in a wretched hovel, wrapped in miserable rags? Can this Child be truly God? … Are you become foolish, O Wise Men … Yes, these Wise Men have become fools that they may be wise!”

With the presents snug in their new homes, the wrapping paper recycled, the New Year’s Eve noisemakers silent, the so-called “holiday season” spent, we can breath a sigh of relief and look forward to celebrating Epiphany.

Epiphany, a solemnity, means “showing” and the Church draws our attention to the Three Magi, to John the Baptist, to Jesus’ first miracle turning water into wine. “Can this Child be truly God?” Epiphany a firm and reliable, “Yes!”

Wyoming Catholic College faculty, staff, and in-town alumni attend Holy Rosary parish here in Lander. This week, our pastor, Fr. James Schumacher gives us some insights on the celebration of Epiphany.

St. John Henry Newman wrote regarding a liberal education, “If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.”

Joseph Susanka arrived at Wyoming Catholic College just before our very first freshman class in 2007. Since then he has had numerous jobs at the college culminating in his two current positions. He is both the college’s Vice President for Advancement and freshman dad.

The third century theologian Origen wrote concerning God becoming man, “The human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled, and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself… To utter these things in human ears and to explain them by words far exceeds the powers we possess either in our moral worth or in mind and speech.”

Wyoming Catholic College theologian and Bible scholar, Dr. Jeremy Holmes quotes Origen in his book Cur Deus Verba: Why the Word became Words. On the one hand, what can we say as we contemplate the mystery of God, the Creator of all things, as a swaddled new-born lying in a bed of straw?

On the other hand, while words are not fully sufficient, if we are to obey the commandment to love God with our minds, we can surely—we must surely—say something.

Twentieth century existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre commented, “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” And it’s not too surprising how many of our contemporaries would agree.

Last spring semester, Dr. Scott Olsson, Associate Professor of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, enjoyed a sabbatical and, as is the rule for professors on sabbaticals at Wyoming Catholic College, he was asked to deliver a lecture presenting his sabbatical research and ruminations to the entire school.

Thus in November, our monthly All-School Lecture featured Dr. Olsson speaking on “What is the World For?” It’s our pleasure to share with you his thought-provoking tonic for our troubled era.

Verses I made once glowing with content;

Tearful, alas, sad songs must I begin.

See how the Muses grieftorn bid me write,

And with unfeigned tears these elegies drench my face.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius who wrote those words had good reason to be grieftorn and to drench his face with unfeigned tears. A successful politician, he was accused of treason in AD 523 and executed a year later. The verses were written while he was in prison awaiting what he knew would be a painful, horrid death. It is the beginning of his most famous work The Consolation of Philosophy.

As Boethius laments, Lady Philosophy appears to him. She casts out the lamenting muses and begins what she refers to as Boethius’ “cure.”

Dr. Jason Baxter has been teaching The Consolation of Philosophy for some time now and is our guest this week on The After-Dinner Scholar.

Each semester here at Wyoming Catholic College, we hold an “All-School Seminar.” All students, faculty, and any interested staff read the same work and meet in groups led by our seniors to discuss what they’ve read. This fall’s All-School Seminar was Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Ion.

In the dialogue, Socrates greets Ion, a rhapsode, that is, a reciter of poetry. Ion specializes in the work of the epic poet Homer—The Iliad and The Odyssey. When Socrates meets him, he is returning from a religious festival where in competition with other rhapsodes, he took first prize for his recitation.

This week, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos, shares with us about Socrates’ and Ion’s conversation.

It’s Thanksgiving week and most of us will gather this Thursday to count our blessings and offer thanks to God "from Whom all blessings flow.”

In giving thanks, it’s easy to remember the extraordinary things in life—promotions, luxuries, home, family, and friends. But there’s much to be said about the extraordinarily ordinary things of life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins gives us an example of praise for the ordinary. And this week Wyoming Catholic College president, Dr. Glenn Arbery discusses Hopkin’s poem, “Pied Beauty.”

“For no path,” wrote Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, “is more open to the soul for the formation thereof than through the ears. Therefore when rhymes and modes have penetrated even to the soul through these organs, it cannot be doubted that they affect the soul with their own character and conform it to themselves.”

Boethius lived from about AD 470 to 524 and is known primarily as a Roman scholar, a Christian philosopher, and a statesman. And it’s because he was a scholar, philosopher, and statesman that he became interested in music.

Prof. Christopher Hodkinson assigned Boethius’ “Fundamentals of Music” to Wyoming Catholic College juniors in the course Music in the Western tradition.

In early October, Dr. Jason Baxter told us about teaching writing to our freshmen. A friend who teaches at another college heard about that and commented, “Good luck with that!” Dr. Baxter had more than good luck, he had great success.

In addition to getting the freshmen to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, he taught them one method of refinement after another. Dr. Baxter also promised an essay competition as part of this freshman Trivium course. That competition happened a couple of weeks ago and Dr. Baxter reported a great deal of raucous cheering and applause. The students are genuinely excited about writing.

The first-place winner—by student and faculty acclaim—was Marietta Mortensen. Marietta hails from right here in Lander, Wyoming, is the eldest of nine, and is often cantor at mid-day Mass in the college chapel. She's our guest on this episode of The After-Dinner Scholar.

Because life is brief and many are the pains which, living and struggling, everyone sustains let us follow our desires, passing and consuming the years because whoever deprives himself of pleasure, to live with anguish and with worries doesn’t know the tricks of the world or by what ills and by what strange happenings all mortals are almost overwhelmed.

“Because life is brief…let us follow our desires” has a contemporary ring to it. Yet those words were penned in 1512 by the playwright and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli in his play La Mandragola, The Mandrake.

This semester, Dr. Tiffany Schubert is teaching Machiavelli’s play to Wyoming Catholic College juniors and it has led to amazing classroom conversations. Why would that be?

“Every generation of Americans,” writes Dr. Christopher Flannery, “from the beginning, has had to answer for itself the question: how should we live? Our answers, generation after generation, in war and in peace, in good times and bad times, in small things and in great things through the whole range of human affairs, are the essential threads of the larger American story.”

While our podcast typically features our Wyoming Catholic College faculty, last week Dr. Christopher Flannery was in Lander and is our guest this week. He is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He was a professor in the Honor’s College at Azusa Pacific University, where he taught for over 30 years.

Dr. Flannery earned his bachelor’s degree from California State University, Northridge, his M.A., and Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School, and an M.A. in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author and voice of “The American Story” podcast.

In the preface to his History of Rome Livy wrote that he wanted to explore, “what was the life, what the mores, by what men, and by what arts—at home and at war—imperium was born and augmented.”

In the course, “Exodus and the American Vision,” What was the life, what the mores, by what men, and by what arts? are questions Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos’s senior humanities students are asking about the American character with the help of authors including John Adams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, and others.

While Genesis 2 tells us that on the seventh day God rested, Thomas Aquinas noted, “It would seem that God did not rest on the seventh day from all His work. For it is said (John 5:17), ‘My Father worketh until now, and I work.’ God indeed ‘worketh until now’ by preserving and providing for the creatures He has made, but not by the making of new ones.”

Perhaps taking a cue from Aquinas, the hymnist wrote, “What God’s almighty power hath made His gracious mercy keepeth.” God made all things and preserves all things whatever “preserves all things” means.

Wyoming Catholic College theologian, Dr. Travis Dziad has been considering this question for some time now taking St. Thomas as his guide.

Someone once quipped, “Thoughts are formed as they pass out the lips or through the fingertips.” That is, speaking or writing gives our thinking clarity and precision.

And so at Wyoming Catholic College our students not only read the Great Books, but they discuss them and write about them.

As our freshmen discover, good discussion skills and good writing skills are not innate. They need to be learned and require study and diligent practice.

Dr. Jason Baxter this semester has been working with our freshmen as they improve their writing skills.

After fleeing the destruction of Troy while leading his young son and carrying his aged father, Aeneas wandered seven years across the Mediterranean. Finally, after his father's death, he and his ships made landfall in Italy. This was the land of his destiny. There he would conquer, establish the Trojans, and found the kingdom that would become Rome.

But before setting out to war, Aeneas told the Sibyl of Apollo, “Since here, they say, are the gates of Death’s king and the dark marsh where the Acheron comes flooding up, please, allow me to go and see my beloved father, meet him face-to-face.”

Dr. Adam Cooper has been reading Virgil’s Aeneid with our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores, guiding them as the Sibyl guided Aeneas into the Underworld.

In the first chapter of his letter to the Christians in Rome, St. Paul wrote, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:18-20).

History bears out the truth of St. Paul’s statement. You don’t need a Bible to know that God exists and that he is eternal, powerful, intelligent, just, and creative. We all live on the same planet, see the same nature, and are able to come to the same obvious conclusions—even if some people refuse.

Nonetheless, Christianity is not a nature religion. It is a revealed religion. God has spoken through the words of the inspired writers of Scripture and through the Church.

So where are the boundaries between what any human can understand about God through reason and what requires revelation?

Prof. Kyle Washut has been discussing just that with our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores as they read St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae together.

Aristotle’s Categories,” writes Davidson College Professor of Philosophy, David Studtmann, “is a singularly important work of philosophy. It not only presents the backbone of Aristotle’s own philosophical theorizing but has exerted an unparalleled influence on the systems of many of the greatest philosophers in the western tradition.”

And freshman philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College begins by being thrown into the deep end as students jump into Aristotle’s Categories. In that work, Aristotle outlines the framework needed to read and understand the works students will encounter later in their intellectual journey: The Physics, The Metaphysics, and The Nicomachean Ethics.

Their guide to The Categories this semester is our guest this week, Dr. Michael Bolin, whose specialties are the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle.

In the past few weeks, this podcast has featured introductions to two of three new faculty at Wyoming Catholic College: Dr. Paul Giesting and Dr. Daniel Shields. Today's podcast introduces the third, Prof. Stephen Hill.

Prof. Hill joins Wyoming Catholic College to teach humanities and the Latin program which, of course, is taught as spoken Latin. Prof. Hill also has proficiency in speaking classical Greek.

“The object of a new year,” quipped G. K. Chesterton, “is not that we should have a new year, but that we should have a new soul.”

While Mr. Chesterton probably had January 1st in mind, anyone in education—including students and parents—knows that the new year begins when school begins and our Wyoming Catholic College students are now in their second week of classes.

A week ago Sunday, as our freshmen matriculated at Wyoming Catholic College, thus beginning a new year, President Glenn Arbery and Dean Kyle Washut had some words of wisdom and encouragement. Last week’s podcast featured Dr. Arbery’s thoughts. This week, we’ll turn to Dean Washut as he discusses a distinctly Wyoming phenomenon all students has experience on their 21-day backpacking expedition: snow in August.

Last Saturday, we welcomed our 68 freshmen—our largest freshman class ever—back from their 21-day backpacking expedition. On Sunday, with students in their Sunday best and faculty garbed in their academic regalia, Msgr. Daniel Seiker, our Latin chaplain celebrated convocation Mass. After a brief break for refreshments, the college community gathered again for the annual matriculation ceremony.

At matriculation, freshmen are formally welcomed into our community of learning and each freshman comes forward to sign his or her name in the big leather-bound book that every freshman has signed since the school’s beginning.

As you might imagine, our college president, Dr. Glenn Arbery had some words of wisdom and encouragement for our freshmen. Here are Dr. Arbery’s remarks.

“Because philosophy arises from awe,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas, “a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.”

Last week our guest on The After-Dinner Scholar was Dr. Paul Giesting, newly-arrived professor of mathematics and science. Today our guest is philosopher, Dr. Daniel Shields who is also new to the college faculty.

Dr. Shields did his undergraduate work at Thomas Aquinas College and received his PhD from the Catholic University of America. His main interest is in philosophy of nature and science, ethics, moral psychology, and medieval philosophy.

Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote, “Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists.’ We would never know they believed in the Trinity, because nothing about their lives reflects trinitarian engagement.”

While Christians are monotheists—that is we believe in only one God—we are not what Rahner called mere monotheists. We believe there is one God who exists eternally as a Trinity of Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “God in three Persons, blessed Trinity,” as the hymnist put it.

On May 4, our podcast featured this week's guest, Dr. Jeremy Holmes, talking about his new book Cur Deus Verba: Why the WORD Became Words. The book is a theology of Scripture, but it begins with a chapter entitled “Why God Created: The Trinity.”

As the new Wyoming Catholic college freshmen—all 68 of them—left for their 21-day backpacking expedition, we reminded them that in freshman theology they’ll be studying God’s second book, The Bible. In the wilderness, they should read their Bibles, but they’re to concentrate on God’s first book, the created world. Mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, flowers, soil, birds, and animals.

That being said, however, in addition to studying the Bible freshman year, they’ll also be studying mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, flowers, soil, birds, and animals in a more systematic way in their freshman course on field science.

This week's guest, Dr. Paul Giesting has just joined the Wyoming Catholic College faculty to teach, among other things, field science.

As Aeneus becomes increasingly comfortable building Carthage with Queen Dido, the god Mercury appears to him. “You, so now you lay foundation stones for the soaring walls of Carthage! Building her gorgeous city, doting on your wife. Blind to your own realm, oblivious to your fate!” Aeneus is supposed to be headed for Italy to build Rome. Carthago delenda est--Carthage must be destroyed.

The final presentation at The Wyoming School of Catholic Thought this past June focused on the story of Aeneas and Dido from Virgil’s Aeneid, the great founding myth of Rome. The parallel with Antony and Cleopatra is obvious and was probably intended.

But there’s a most important difference: where Antony stayed in Egypt forsaking Rome, Aeneas fled Carthage for the sake of Rome.

At the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, Dr. Tiffany Schubert offered this presentation about the two couples and the relationship of politics and eros.

The story of King David’s tryst with Bathsheba begins with these ominous words, “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go forth to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel…. But David remained at Jerusalem.” (2 Samuel 11:1).

Just as David remained in Jerusalem “when kings go forth to battle,” the great Roman general, Mark Antony, remained in Egypt, captivated by Queen Cleopatra. “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space,” he tells her.

The result as Shakespeare explains in the title of the play is “The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra.”

At the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought in June, Wyoming Catholic College professor Dr. Adam Cooper introduced Shakespeare’s play and its themes.

“Let me have men about me that are fat; “Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

So said Julius Caesar to Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Tragedy of Julius Caesar." Cassius was indeed dangerous as Caesar discovered on the Ides of March when a group of Senators led by Cassius stabed him to death.

They, for their part, believed their action represented the height of patriotism. Caesar would be king—an abomination in the Roman Republic. “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” they shouted as Caesar’s blood dripped from their knives and hands.

Were Cassius, Brutus, and the rest patriots or treasonous monsters? Dante put Cassius and Brutus in the frozen bottom of Hell endlessly chewed by Satan chews along with Judas Iscariot. What was Shakespeare’s judgment on these men and their plot? And how should we look at the conspirators and their attempt to defend the republic from what they perceived as tyranny?

At the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, the college’s adult learning week, in June, most of those conversations took place in seminar sessions, but Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos started the discussion with this introduction.

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you; And here remain with your uncertainty! Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!

The quote is from William Shakespeare’s tragedy “Coriolanus.” Coriolanus was a great war hero during the fifth century BC, the early years of the Roman Republic. After returning from a great victory, the Roman Senate would make him a consul—the highest office in the city. But the common people of Rome egged on by their leaders, the tribunes, believe him too proud and vote instead to banish him from the city. In anger Coriolanus cries, “I banish you,” leaves the city, and joins ranks with the enemy to revenge the insult by conquering Rome.

“Coriolanus” was the first of three plays we considered in June at the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought as we considered “’Shakespeare’s Rome.” Before we divided into seminar groups, Dr. Virginia Arbery delivered this introduction to the play, to the Roman Republic, and to questions concerning our own republic.

From June 6-11, a group of forty adult students gathered in Lander for The Wyoming School of Catholic Thought. Our topic was “Shakespeare’s Rome” which we then related to Shakespeare’s England—he lived during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign—and to our America.

While we can’t bring you the interaction we all enjoyed during seminars, which accounted for most of our time together, this and the following four podcasts feature the introductory remarks of our faculty to the plays “Coriolanus,” “Julius Caesar,” and “Antony and Cleopatra” and the story of Aeneus and Dido from Virgil’s Aeneid.

Dr. Glenn Arbery, our college president, delivered this lecture to introduce the week’s topic.

If you’d like to “brush up your Shakespeare” as Cole Porter famously put it, read Shakespeare’s tragedy, “Coriolanus” in anticipation of next week’s podcast by Dr. Virginia Arbery.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring;

Gerard Manley Hopkin’s sonnet, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” has become one of the poems Wyoming Catholic College graduates memorized over the course of four years. And it’s the one our seniors, as a class, recited during their weekend of graduation festivities. The recitation was led by Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos who has a great personal love for this challenging poem.

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,” begins George Herbert’s poem “Love (III).” It’s one of the 26 poems students at Wyoming Catholic College memorize over their four years and one of the most beloved.

George Herbert, an Anglican clergyman, lived a mere 39 years, from 1593 to 1633. Yet the great Puritan pastor and theologian, Richard Baxter said of him, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth in God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his books.”

Dr. Tiffany Schubert taught the poem this year and began this interview by telling us something about poet George Herbert.

Each year on the evening before commencement, it falls on the president of Wyoming Catholic College to host the President’s Dinner and to address not only the graduates, but their parents, siblings, grandparents, and friends.

The Wyoming Catholic College class of 2021’s junior and senior years were, of course, marked by pandemic, panic, and social distance. Theirs was an unusual college career.

Yet, as college president, Dr. Glenn Arbery, noted in his address at the President’s Dinner, it was a class that nonetheless excelled in every way.

Here are Dr. Arbery’s remarks in their entirety.

Note: Please excuse the fidelity of the speech. It is not as good as we had hoped. Dr. Arbery's words, however, will more than make up for any inconvenience.

Each year our Wyoming Catholic College graduating class selects one of its members to speak on its behalf during the commencement exercises. This year, the Class of 2021 chose Mr. Anthony Jones as their spokesman.

In addition to graduating Magna Cum Laude—posting the second highest grade point average in his class—Anthony founded Cowboys for Life, the college’s pro-life group and organized the first pro-life march in Lander. He was active in Wyoming politics, serve as summer intern at Family Research Counsel and The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, and traveled to Ireland one summer to fight the legalization of abortion in Ireland.

After graduation and two weeks in the backcountry with classmates, Anthony will be moving to Austin, Texas to work at the Texas Policy Foundation before attending graduate school in public policy.

Here are Anthony’s remarks in their entirety.

When he delivered his “Regensburg Address” in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI set off a firestorm of anger. Not only had he criticized Islam and modern scientism, he had the temerity to suggest that what the world really needs is Catholicism. Nearly fifteen years later, sound far less profligate and far more prophetic.

Of course, the Regensburg Address was not primarily about Islam or about scientism. Pope Benedict argued for the place of reason in human life. Without it, we either end up with subjective religiosity ungoverned by reason and leading toward fanaticism or we limit reason to mathematics and physics leading to a cold, calculated science that erases religion and morality and with them our humanity.

Dr. Michael Bolin read Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address with our Wyoming Catholic College seniors in the weeks before graduation.

“Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it,” wrote conservative political theorist Russell Kirk, “they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.”

The twentieth century, in contrast with what Kirk wrote, witnessed various attempts to improve society by setting them on fire. And the twenty-first century has the nasty feel of more of the same.

Our final guest lecturer here at Wyoming Catholic College was historian Dr. Susan Hanssen from the University of Dallas. The day before her lecture, she addressed the student St. Boethius Society about Russell Kirk and the history and current state of American conservatism.

As they begin their devotional guide for married couples, 30 Days with Married Saints, Wyoming Catholic College theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski and his wife Cait ask the reader to imagine a beatification ceremony for a married couple. The words they quote are from St. John Paul II’s homily at the beatification of Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, but they add, “One day, God willing, such a homily might be given for you! You may think this possibility highly unrealistic and perhaps it’s true that you and your spouse will never be officially canonized. But that doesn’t mean that you cannot become saints.”

Their book 30 Days with Married Saints is a means to that end.

I began by asking Kent and Cait what inspired them to write the book.

Quoting St. Jerome, the great fifth century Bible scholar, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (133) tells us:

The Church “forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful. . . to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ, by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”

Theologians throughout the life of the Church pointed out not just a connection, but a identification between Jesus Who is the Word of God made flesh and the Scriptures, the Word of God written and handed down to us.

But how does that work? What does it mean?

Theologian Dr. Jeremy Holmes hopes that his new book will answer that question. The title is Cur Deus Verba: Why the WORD Became Words.

To sign up for the free distance learning course "Reading Your Bible for All It's Worth," visit the Wyoming Catholic College website.

In his new book An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Recovering the Wildness of Spiritual Life, Wyoming Catholic College professor Dr. Jason Baxter notes that today mysticism makes us more than a little nervous. It seems to have New Age and Eastern connotations. Nonetheless, he notes, “in the premodern age..., ‘mysticism’ wasn’t some bizarre, exotic, cultish, or unusual phenomenon (like it has become), stored on bookshelves dealing with paranormal occurrences; rather it was seen as the lifeblood of prayer and adoration of God in the soul.” Then he goes on, “Ignoring it would be like selling a precious family heirloom at an estate sale because you didn’t know what it was.”

In this podcast, Dr. Baxter begins by explaining what this heirloom—what mysticism is.

For more of Dr. Baxter's books, articles, and lectures go to jasonmbaxter.com

In his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky explores questions of good and evil, alienation and belonging, the existence of God and the nature of morality.

As scholar and author Kenneth Boa writes in his four-volume A Taste of the Classics, “The Brothers Karamazov is a remarkable work that explores the whole human range of behavior, from the depths of depravity to the heights of exultation and from the meanness of the human spirit to the great nobility of which it is capable.”

This semester, Wyoming Catholic College seniors have been reading “The Brothers K” under the capable tutelage of Prof. Adam Cooper. I asked Prof. Cooper what attracts him to the novel.

It makes no sense at first: a band of heroes, Led by an old man with a bolo tie, Who saved a world that was not worth saving. There’s nothing for it then but to explain. Perhaps for most of you it’s history, But there’s a right way and a wrong way To tell a story, and this on is epic.

Thus begins Fredrick Turner’s modern science fiction epic, Apocalypse. It’s the third sci-fi epic he has written and like Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Dante before him, he has written them in verse.

Dr. Turner is a poet, a cultural critic, a playwright, a philosopher of science, an interdisciplinary scholar, an aesthetician, an essayist and a translator, as well as the author of 28 books, including Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science; Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education; and Epic: Form, Content, and History.

Dr. Turner, now retired Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Texas Dallas, delivered a lecture here at Wyoming Catholic College. While he was in Lander, Dr. Turner was kind enough to join us for a podcast interview.

Dr. Turner's lecture can be found here.

“The Resurrection of Jesus,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the crowning truth of our faith in Christ, a faith believed and lived as the central truth by the first Christian community; handed on as fundamental by Tradition; established by the documents of the New Testament; and preached as an essential part of the Paschal mystery along with the cross.”

The resurrection is not reincarnation. It’s not reanimation. Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, second Person of the Blessed Trinity really and truly died on the cross, was buried in a borrowed tomb, and rose again from the dead.

During Holy Week, our podcast featured Dr. Jeremy Holmes discussing the Gospel of John chapter 19—the cross. During this Easter Octave, Dr. Kent Lasnoski joins us to discuss John chapter 20 and the resurrection.

Faithful cross, above all other, One and only noble tree: None in foliage, none in blossom, None in fruit thy peers may be: Sweetest wood and sweetest iron, Sweetest weight is hung on thee.

While each time we see a cross or a crucifix and every time we attend Mass we have the opportunity to ponder Christ’s great sacrifice, during Holy Week it becomes almost the exclusive focus of our attention.

Writing about Good Friday in his book Death on a Friday Afternoon, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote, “This is the axis mundi, the center upon which the cosmos turns. In the derelict who cries from the cross is, or so Christians say, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. The life of all on this day died. Stay a while with that dying.”

The Gospel of John, chapter 19 tells the story of that dying. In this podcast Dr. Jeremy Holmes discusses John 19 and the death of Jesus.

St. Benedict in his Rule wrote concerning prayer, “ ‘Seven times in the day,’ says the Prophet [psalmist], ‘I have rendered praise to you.’ Now that sacred number of seven will be fulfilled by us if we perform the offices of our service at the time of the morning office, of prime, of terce, of sext, of none, of vespers and of compline, since it was of these day hours that he said, ‘Seven times in the day I have rendered praise to you.’ For as to the night office the same Prophet says, ‘In the middle of the night I arose to glorify you.’ ”

Today priests, bishops, religious, and a surprising number of lay Christians pray through the day using the Daily Office. Msgr. Daniel Seiker, Wyoming Catholic College's Latin chaplain, explains what it means to pray the office and why it's important.

Education, as the current US Department of Education website has it, is all about “student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness.”

If that's the case, then it stands to reason that education will be entirely pragmatic, teaching skills—marketable skills—and that student success will be a function of pragmatic, marketable skills.

That’s especially clear in the seemingly esoteric world of college entrance tests—the SAT and ACT. Both tests claim to measure “college and career readiness” and schools, wanting their graduates to succeed “teach to the test,” conforming their curricula to the measured practical and marketable skills measured by the tests.

Partly as a result of his Christian convictions, Jeremy Tate who ran a company that helped students prep for the SAT and ACT, became disillusioned with the whole system and started a company to compete with the two giants of college admissions testing. Mr. Tate’s Classic Learning Test (CLT) continues to gain traction and it’s the test Wyoming Catholic College is most pleased to see in admissions transcripts. Mr. Tate visited Wyoming Catholic College and was kind enough to be our guest on this podcast.

We Americans are nothing if not activists. In our homes, in our careers, in our parishes we’re the people who want to make things happen. And so it may come as a surprise to read Pope St. John Paul II’s words, “In the consecrated life the proclamation of the Gospel to the whole world finds fresh enthusiasm and power.”

In 1996, after a synod about the consecrated life, St. John Paul wrote the Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consecrata, “On the Consecrated life and its Mission in the Church and in the World.”

The consecrated life—that is, the life led by monks and nuns—“is at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission, since it ‘manifests the inner nature of the Christian calling’ and the striving of the whole Church as Bride towards union with her one Spouse.”

This past week, theologian Dr. Jeremy Holmes led our seniors through a discussion of Vita Consecrata and he is our guest on this edition of The After-Dinner Scholar.

It may be hard to believe, but the Catholic Church has a patron saint of humor: Philip Neri who noted that, “A cheerful and glad spirit attains to perfection much more readily than a melancholy spirit.” And my observation is that we can become cheerful and glad people as we laugh.

Last week The After-Dinner Scholar featured Wyoming Catholic College senior, Miss Amanda Johnson, talking about her theologically rich oration about horsemanship as an aid to restoring our fallen humanity.

This week senior Kevin Milligan discusses his philosophically rich oration was entitled: “Laughing at Perfection: A Classification of Laughter and a Defense of Its Role in the Natural Perfection of Man.”

Winston Churchill once quipped, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.” Wyoming Catholic College senior, Miss Amanda Johnson enthusiastically agrees.

Last week was senior oration week at Wyoming Catholic. As I explained last week, our seniors write a thesis in the fall and after Christmas break present some portion of their work in a half hour lecture followed by a half hour of questions from a faculty panel and from their peers.

Topics ranged from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins to nostalgia in Willa Cather’s novels, from the chiastic structure of St. Augustine’s Confessions to cryptography, from hunting to horsemanship—the topic of this podcast. Our guest is Miss Amanda Johnson, one of our star horsewomen.

Mark Twain observed, “There are only two types of speakers in the world. 1. The nervous and 2. Liars.” I suspect that our Wyoming Catholic College seniors can relate.

In the fall semester, Wyoming Catholic College seniors write theses on topics of their choosing. This week, at the beginning of Spring semester, each senior will share his or her thesis research with the college community in a senior oration. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday classes are canceled and each member of the class of 2021 will deliver a half hour lecture followed by a half hour of questions put to them by a faculty panel and by their fellow students.

Dr. Virginia Arbery teaches rhetoric, the foundation of the senior orations and she shares with us the place of rhetoric and public speaking in a Wyoming Catholic College education.

In his Divine Comedy, writes Wyoming Catholic College professor Dr. Jason Baxter, Dante “intentionally gathered creatures, places, landscapes, and practices from across the world and types of encyclopedic texts and then filled his book with their imagines; and, second, the poet consistently and insistently constructs moment in which we—along with the pilgrim—must take it all in at a glance, as if we are viewing the whole imago mundi from above.”

That quotation from Dr. Baxter comes from his new scholarly book, The Infinite Beauty of the World: Dante’s Encyclopedia and the Names of God published in time for the commemoration of Dante Alighiri’s death in 1321. And certainly anyone who has read the Commedia is well acquainted with the whirl of images and ideas contained in every Canto.

In this edition of The After-Dinner Scholar, Dr. Baxter discusses his new scholarly book as well as making Dante accessible to non-scholars.

Most people, when winter sets in, are willing to go out now and again, but would rather sit by a fire with a hot beverage reading. No doubt our Wyoming Catholic College freshmen would enjoy that, but instead this week they’re camping in the shadow of the Grand Teton.

Just as our freshmen arrive early for fall semester so that they can spend three weeks backpacking, so they arrived early for spring semester head out into the wilderness—this time a cold snowy wilderness—for a week of backpacking, camping, cross-country skiing, and a day of alpine skiing.

Bob Milligan (Class of 2018) is on the staff of Wyoming Catholic College's COR Expeditions. He has been working on the freshmen winter trip logistics was kind enough to take a brief time out to tell us about the trip.

Regarding the civilizations of ancient Rome and Greece, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges wrote in 1864, “What we have received from them leads us to believe that we resemble them. We have some difficulty in considering them as foreign nations; it is almost always ourselves that we see in them. Hence spring many errors.”

The ancient city, writes Coulanges, was in essence a religious association. The gods of each city, the soil of each city, and the people of each city were unique. Thus the only civic conceivable was the city.

Then something changed. Or rather multiple things changed.

Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos uses Coulanges book The Ancient City as a way of bridging how citizenship was understood in the ancient world of Plato’s Athens or Coriolanus’s Rome and how citizenship came to be understood beginning with Augustine’s City of God. Dr. Papadopoulos is our guest this week.

St. James wrote, “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” (James 5:13-15)

What with COVID, you’d expect we’d hear rather a lot about the sacrament of anointing the sick or as it has been called in the past Extreme Unction.

We in our day, however, are most likely to call our physician for an appointment or possibly the telehealth line than we are to call our priest asking to be anointed with oil. At least until doctors, hospitals, and the great pharmacopeia fail us and death seems imminent.

Is there still a place for anointing the sick?

Having recently taught about the sacraments, Dr. Kent Lasnoski has been reflecting on the meaning of anointing the sick.

If you come to Lander, Wyoming, it’s hard not to notice the landscape: cliffs, rises, canyons, and the high peaks of the Wind River Mountain Range.

College for Wyoming Catholic College freshmen begins by studying God’s first book: The Creation. During their three-week freshman expedition they drink in the beauty, majesty, and power..

When they return from the expedition, in theology they study God’s second book: the Holy Scriptures. But in field science, it’s back to the first book as they carefully examine the flora and fauna of our region along with the rocks.

Our guest this week, Prof. Lauren Heerschap has worked for the Colorado Geological Survey, and has taught geology in Zermatt, Switzerland, Durango, Colorado. Her enthusiasm about our rocks is contagious.

Wyoming Catholic College is pleased to announce that we will host another session of The Wyoming School of Catholic Thought. Adult learners will gather from across the country here in Lander from Sunday, June 6 to Friday, June 11 to discuss “Shakespeare’s Rome.”

We’ll dig into three of Shakespeare’s plays: “Coriolanus,” reflecting on the early years of the Roman Republic, followed by “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra” focusing on the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire

What can we learn about: Rome and Shakespeare’s England? Rome and America? Rome and Christianity? Honor, eros, and that most Roman of virtues, piety? How can these plays inform our lives as individuals, as citizens, and as Catholic Christians?

This week's guest is Wyoming Catholic College president, Dr. Glenn Arbery, one of the professors at the Wyoming School.

For more information about The Wyoming School of Catholic Thought or to register visit the college website: wyomingcatholic.edu/wsct.

C. S. Lewis told the story of his brother's experience on a bus. As they passed a church with a creche outside, a woman remarked “Oh Lor’! They bring religion into everything. Look—they’re dragging it even into Christmas now!”

That was way back in 1959. Even then Lewis found the commercialization and secularization of Christmas revolting contrasting what he called “our feast of the Nativity” with what he referred to as “all this ghastly ‘Xmas’ racket.”

This last week before The Feast of the Nativity many are in full Xmas-rush mode: last-minute shopping, last-minute decorating, another batch of cookies or two, getting ready for family to arrive for the festivities. By Christmas Day we’ll either be slouching toward Bethlehem or we’ll arrive totally wired.

How do we avoid that? Wyoming Catholic College chaplain Fr. David Anderson reflects on his preparation and experience of Christmas.

“I sometimes ask myself,” said Albert Einstein, “how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about the problem of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.”

About five weeks ago, Dr. Henry Zepeda was a guest on this podcast talking about Euclidian geometry: points, lines, planes, angles, and solids. Euclid described the world as we see it today, the way we typically consider the true way of seeing it.

In 1905, however, a young man named Albert Einstein proposed something different. Euclid, he said, hadn’t taken into consideration motion and time. Once you do that, he reasoned, geometry needs to be taken as a branch of physics.

Dr. Michael Bolin who teaches Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity to Wyoming Catholic College seniors talks more about that.

While there are many novels in our era and prior to our era that have unhappy endings, novelist Jane Austen did not write any of them. Austen’s novels end, for the good characters, just as we would hope. “I am the happiest creature in the world,” writes Elizabeth Bennett about her engagement near the end of Pride and Prejudice. “Perhaps other people have said so before,” she goes on, “but not one with such justice.” How marvelous. Or is it?

Beginning on Thursday, January 14, Dr. Tiffany Schubert will be teaching a free six-week distance learning class entitled “‘This Holiday of Spirits’: Jane Austen, Courtly Love, and Happy Endings.” This podcast conversation with Dr. Schubert will give you a taste of what's to come.

Visit our website for more information on this free course and to sign up.

Summing up the reign of Israel’s first king, 1Chronicles 10 tells us, “So Saul died for his unfaithfulness; he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance, and did not seek guidance from the Lord. Therefore the Lord slew him, and turned the kingdom over to David the son of Jesse.”

Saul did not, however, begin his reign unfaithful to the Lord. In fact, given his druthers, he probably would not have begun his reign at all. Saul started out as the reluctant king, but that didn’t last.

During the fall, Dr. Jeremy Holmes leads Wyoming Catholic College freshmen through the history of God’s People in the Old Testament. He always pauses to discuss the short, troubling reign of King Saul.

Novelist Fredrick Beuchner wrote, “In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You are aware of the beating of your heart. The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.”

As the world around us accelerates into the Christmas holiday season immediately after Thanksgiving—Santa figuring prominently at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—we Christians wait. And waiting is precisely the theme of Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas Day and the twelve days of the Christmas season.

As we prepare for Advent, Msgr. Daniel Seiker, one of the two chaplains at Wyoming Catholic College, shared about Advent and preparing for Christmas.

“First of all, then,” St. Paul wrote in 1Timothy 2:1-4, “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.”

We might have expected St. Paul to tell Timothy to pray “for kings and all who are in high position, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.” But he goes beyond that, urging that thanksgivings “for kings and all who are in high position.” That seems a bit peculiar or at least unexpected given that in AD 64, when St. Paul wrote this epistle, the Roman emperor was Nero who, among other violent and perverse behavior, ruthlessly persecuted Christians. Give thanks for him?

Here at the college there have been discussions with political philosopher, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos about thanksgiving as a civic virtue—something incumbent on us not only as Christians, but as citizens. With our annual national celebration of Thanksgiving coming up, we continued the conversation as a podcast.

In 1959 Oxford University Press published a 200-page book containing 451 translations (half of them in English) of a single 16-line Latin poem, Ad Pyrrham or “The Ode to Pyrrha.” The poet—now nearly forgotten—was perhaps the most influential poet of all time. His name: Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace.

For 2,000 years Horace was admired as possibly the greatest poet in history. And then Latin—especially advanced Latin—became a thing of the past and few were able to read his grammatically complex works. Today, of course, poetry itself has become passé.

But at Wyoming Catholic College, Latin is a required subject and poems are read, studied, and memorized. Latinist Eugene Hamilton has been helping a group of students work there way through a selection of Horace’s Odes.

Beginning the second semester of freshman year, Wyoming Catholic College students begin studying Euclidian geometry. Students prepare for each class carefully waiting to be called to the board to demonstrate one of this week’s propositions.

Euclid wrote his Elements in about 300 BC. Beginning with the definitions of a point and a line, he constructed the geometrical principles we still use today. And our students work their way from “On a given finite straight line to construct an equilateral triangle” to “construct an icosahedron and comprehend it in a sphere” to Book XII, Proposition 17, popularly known as constructing The Death Star.

Why Euclid? Our website puts it this way, “Euclid’s Elements is the foundational text of mathematics in Western civilization.” Dr. Henry Zepeda began this interview by explaining how that's the case.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus, struggling to get home from Calypso’s island, is shipwrecked. Naked, destitute, looking for all the world like a vagabond, he is nonetheless welcomed by Alkinoos, king of the Phaiakians. Alkinoos and his people treat him like a king, take his story to heart, and transport him to his home Ithaka with a vast trove of gifts. That is, they treated him with hospitality.

These days we think of hospitality in much less grandiose terms. There’s hospitality hour after church: donuts, coffee, and small talk. We might offer hospitality as a meal or a night or two in our spare bedroom, but only for those we know—or relatives of those we know. For everyone else, there’s "the hospitality industry" to provide rooms, beds, and meals.

Thus Odysseus’ adventures and misadventures provide a whole new perspective on how we treat guests, even those who are strangers to us.

Prof. Adam Cooper is new to Wyoming Catholic College this year and is in the midst of teaching The Odyssey to our freshmen, drawing their attention to this major theme in the poem: hospitality.

We’ve all experienced walking into a church in which the architecture and/or the sacred art was… let’s say "unpleasant" to the point of distraction. And we’ve all had the experience of entering a church whose beauty draws us into the mysteries of the Faith and upward to God and to worship. Sacred art can and should have a profound effect on our spiritual lives.

David Clayton has been thinking about sacred art for many years. Prof. Clayton moved to the US from his native England in 2009 and was for several years artist in residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire where his icons adorn the college’s chapel. Currently he is Provost of Pontifex University where he designed their unique Master of Sacred Arts program, a formation in creativity for all (not just artists). His blog and podcast are at thewayofbeauty.org. His books include Painting the Nude - The Theology of the Body and the Representation of Man in Christian Art and The Way of Beauty, a book our Wyoming Catholic College seniors read in their study of art.

David Clayton was here in Lander delivering a lecture to the college last Friday entitled “Why Sacred Art is Necessary to the Faith.” Saturday morning before a bit of Wyoming hiking, Prof. Clayton was kind enough to record this interview about sacred art and beauty.

If you’re interested in watching David Clayton’s entire presentation, you can access it at the college website, wyomingcatholic.edu.

“Ours is an education of immersion,” we say on our college website “immersion in the Western tradition, immersion in the beauty and challenges of the wilderness, immersion in the treasures of our Catholic spiritual heritage.”

When planning a time to record this interview our Latin rite college chaplain Msgr. Daniel Seiker, Monsignor pulled out his schedule: “11:00 AM confessions, 11:35 Mass, 1:00 PM Adoration, 3:30 to 5:00 confessions, 5:00 PM Benediction.” He didn’t add the numerous appointments he has with students seeking spiritual direction. So it’s safe to say that our students are able to experience “immersion in the treasures of our Catholic spiritual heritage” and that we keep our chaplains exceptionally busy.

Poet Sally Thomas in the August/September issue of First Things wrote, “It is one thing to talk about the Resurrection. It is quite another to see the Easter fire struck in the night, the candle lit, the light of Christ filling the tomblike darkness of the waiting church. As a Catholic, I live and relive that liturgy every year; every year it astonishes me as no amount of evidence-based argument—The Case for the Resurrection—could ever do. Yes, yes, I want to say to the apologist, I get it. But when the lights come on and the bells ring and the music starts, I know it.”

What Sally Thomas describes in her article is experiential knowing or, as we call it here at Wyoming Catholic College, poetic knowing. It’s a mode of knowing that is, in fact, the beginning and the end of a liberal arts education.

In an op-ed column in USAToday last week, Wyoming Catholic College senior Anthony Jones wrote: “I gathered with the entire student body of Wyoming Catholic College on Sept. 17, 2019, for a mandatory celebration of Constitution Day. We began with the Pledge of Allegiance, witnessed a lively panel discussion between professors on the history and modern relevance of America’s founding principles, and concluded by singing patriotic songs.”

Anthony Jones went on, “If you are a student at a typical American university, that description probably sounds foreign to anything you have experienced. Anti-Americanism has spread across college campuses like a wildfire, igniting rage and resentment against anything perceived as oppressive — even the American flag. As a result, most universities would likely shy away from a celebration of our nation’s founding in favor of more ‘inclusive’ events.”

On September 17 of this year, Anthony along with the rest of the student body of Wyoming Catholic College as well as faculty and staff gathered to celebrate Constitution Day 2020.

This year we heard from retired federal judge, Dr. Leon Holmes. Judge Holmes received his PhD in political science from Duke University and his JD from the University of Arkansas School of Law. He served sixteen years on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Retiring from the court earlier this year, Judge Holmes is a visiting professor this fall at Wyoming Catholic College.

It’s a word we don’t hear very often these days, but one that was of utmost importance to our ancestors—actual and figurative. In fact, they couldn’t live without it. The word is “honor.”

Ancient Romans practiced a timocratic—that is, an honor-loving—way of life. The Roman historian Livy in particular highlights the great deeds done for the honor of the city and for personal honor as well as the heinous and dishonorable crimes of, for example, the early kings of Rome—crimes that led to their downfall and exile.

Wyoming Catholic College sophomores have been reading Livy with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos. In this interview, Dr. Papadopoulos begins by responding to one of his own paper prompts.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles Those words are among the first Wyoming Catholic College freshmen read as fall semester begins. They open Homer’s Iliad. In the epic, “Atreus’ son the lord of men,” that is, Agamemnon so offends Achilles that Achilles refuses to fight. As a result, the Greeks suffer defeat after defeat before the walls of Troy, being driven back and back to their ships on the beach. Until....

Dr. Glenn Arbery, President of Wyoming Catholic College loves Homer’s Iliad and is once again in the classroom with freshmen introducing this, one of the greatest of The Great Books.

The tendency of science to reduce all of the world and life in it to predictable laws of physics is not new. And poets since William Wordsworth two hundred years ago have insisted that life ought not to be reduced.

Since the theme of this year’s Wyoming School was “Beauty is Truth: Science and the Catholic Imagination,” we looked to poets to help us inform our imaginations as we look at world around us, the heavens, and our own human nature.

The poetry we read and discussed is all available online for free.

Henry Vaughn, “Water-fall”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “Pied Beauty,” “The Windhover”
William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us,” “The Tables Turned”
Robert Frost, “Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”

“Saint Thomas, who was as simple as he was wise,” wrote Jacques Maritain, “defined the beautiful as that which, being seen, pleases: id quod visum placet. These four words say all that is necessary: a vision, that is to say, an intuitive knowledge, and a delight.”

At this summer’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, we began by looking at the Medieval cosmos. It is a beautiful vision that, alas, turns out not to be true. Then we looked at the modern vision—the vision of scientism—in which the universe is nothing but a randomly constituted result of elementary particles bumping into each other. It is a universe without goodness, beauty, or truth—save the truth (maybe) of mathematics and physics.

Yet the topic of our week together was, “Beauty is Truth: Science and the Catholic Imagination.”

After we reduced the Medieval cosmos to “fermions and bosons,” Dr. Jeremy Holmes began putting the world back together arguing that beauty is a necessary part of the scientific endeavor. His lecture was over an hour long, but will, I think, be well worth your time and concentration. Hearing it again brought great delight so, using Thomas' definition, it can be called a beautiful lecture.

Duke University professor and philosopher Alex Rosenberg began an essay on Scientism with a series of questions and his answers:

Is there a God? No.
What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.
What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.
What is the meaning of life?
Why am I here? Just dumb luck.
Does prayer work? Of course not.
Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?
Is there free will? Not a chance!
What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good or Bad? There is no moral difference between them.
Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.
Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.

At this year’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, Dr. Tiffany Shubert began by talking about the Medieval cosmos, a cosmos full of meaning, harmony, and truth. And last week’s After Dinner Scholar podcast was her lecture about the Medieval cosmos.

Next, we held a seminar discussing Alex Rosenberg’s essay “Scientism Versus the Theory of Mind” with its opening series of questions and answers. Before the seminar began, to avoid unnecessary intellectual whiplash, Dr. Jim Tonkowich spoke about how we got from a reality filled with the presence of God and with purpose to Rosenberg’s comment that, “Reality is the forsightless play of fermions and bosons producing the illusion of purpose.”

In the Epilogue to his book The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, C. S. Lewis wrote, “I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old [Medieval] Model [of the universe] delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect; it was not true.”

Last week the annual Wyoming School of Catholic Thought was held here in Lander. The topic was “Beauty is Truth: Science and the Catholic Imagination.” Our readings in science and in literature considered this question of how we see the world, how we image it even before we think about it.

That began with a look at Medieval science and cosmology. The group read and discussed chapter 5 and the Epilogue from Lewis’ The Discarded Image guided by Dr. Tiffany Schubert who offered this introduction to the topic.

A gentleman, well into his 70s with a PhD in law is in the process of making his college years’ dream come true. He wanted to study classics as an undergraduate, but his father had other ideas. He wouldn’t pay for a degree in classics, and so my friend took a pre-law degree followed by law school. But the love for the classics and the liberal arts never left him. Now, in fact, he’s studying the Liberal Arts.

Last week the After Dinner Scholar featured a conversation with Dr. John Mortensen of the Aquinas Institute about The Great Books Core Curriculum, a joint venture with Wyoming Catholic College to offer distance learning courses in the Liberal Arts for undergraduate credit beginning this fall.

Our guest this week, Wyoming Catholic College theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski, serves as the Academic Dean of the program.

Let’s be honest. Participating in an academic class by sitting in front of a screen is not the same as being physically present with the professor and other students. On the other hand, given current technology, it’s not all that bad.

Dr. John Mortensen is a former Wyoming Catholic College professor and dean and President of the Aquinas Institute. Along with some current Wyoming Catholic College faculty who are also associated with the Aquinas Institute, Dr. Mortensen taught online during the COVID shutdown this spring. And while it was hardly perfect, nonetheless it worked pretty well.

As a result, Dr. Mortensen proposed that Wyoming Catholic College work with The Aquinas Institute to offer twelve distance undergraduate courses, The Great Books Core Curriculum. And this fall, that curriculum will be available for full academic credit.

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. On September 3, Great Britain declared war on Germany. On September 29, the Feast of St. Michael in the Anglican Church, the term began at Oxford University. Studies? Classes? Learning? In War-Time?

Academics at Wyoming Catholic College focuses on the great books of the liberal arts tradition—a tradition stretching back beyond the founding of Oxford in 1096. And Oxford in 1939 was still almost exclusively the liberal arts. What was the point of reading Homer, Herodotus, and Dante, studying Euclid, perfecting an understanding of Latin and Greek with a war going on?

On Sunday, October 22, 1939 at St. Mary the Virgin Church in Oxford, literary scholar and Oxford do C. S. Lewis stepped into the pulpit to answer that question? His sermon “Learning in War-Time” has become something of a classic and Dr. Jason Baxter studied that sermon earlier this month with high school students who attended Wyoming Catholic College’s PEAK Program.

“The heavens call to you and wheel about you, revealing their eternal splendors,” Virgil told Dante at the end of Purgatorio 14 (148-151), “but your eyes are fixed upon the earth. For that, He, seeing all, does smite you.”

While we could blame light pollution or television or lack of interest or any number of other modern maladies, but it’s clear that, just as in Dante’s time, the heavens call and wheel about and us most of us never notice. If, for example, you know the phase of the moon today, you’re part of a tiny, tiny minority of modern people. Virgil accuses us as well, “your eyes are fixed upon the earth.”

Dante lived at the turn of the 14th century and in his writing used a model of the universe conceived in the second century by astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy. Born in AD 100 in Alexandria, Egypt, Ptolemy argued from observation of the heavens that the earth (a sphere) was at the center and around it the moon, sun, planets, and stars rotated.

Clearly we no longer believe that, but Ptolemy still has a great deal to teach us about observing the sky and marking it’s beauty and regularity. Dr. Henry Zepeda taught Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo with high school students who have been here at Wyoming Catholic College for our PEAK Program.

“The canyon of Lodore is twenty and three-quarter miles in length,” wrote Major John Wesley Powell who was the first to descended the Green River through the canyon in June 1869. “It starts abruptly at what we have called the Gate of Lodore, with walls nearly two thousand feet high, and they are never lower than this until we reach Alcove Brook, about three miles above the foot. They are very irregular, standing in vertical or overhanging cliffs in places, terraced in others, or receding in steep slopes, and are broken by many side gulches and canyons.”

Powell and his men found the river from the Gate of Lodore very tough going with multiple long portages around rapids and the loss of one of four boats along with a great deal of supplies and scientific instruments in what he named “Disaster Falls.”

Of course those were the days before nylon, gor tex, polyester fleece, and good strong river rafts, the kind used by the recent COR Expeditions rafting trip down the Green River. Bob Milligan, a 2018 graduate of Wyoming Catholic College now on COR staff led the trip.

For more information about COR Expeditions visit the COR website.

The Greeks finally defeated the Persian Empire in about 448 BC. When that war ended, the Athenians began to build an empire leading to a new war this one with their former allies. Central to the empire building and beginnings of the Peloponnesian War was the statesman Pericles.

During the first of our two two-week-long PEAK programs for high school students, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos taught a course about Pericles. His story is told by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War and by Plutarch in Lives.

In the last of the speeches Pericles delivers in Thucydides’ account, Pericles tells an angry crowd, “And yet if you are angry with me, it is with one who, as I believe, is second to no man either in knowledge of the proper policy, or in the ability to expound it, and who is moreover not only a patriot but an honest one.” Was he really as good as all that? Was the age of Pericles truly the golden age of Athens?

The well-laid plan was to fly to Maine for vacation, but it became clear that the travel restrictions there would make for a terrible vacation. So instead, Jim and Dottie Tonkowich drove north.

Their vacation trip of about 1,675 miles went from Lander to Cody, Yellowstone National Park, Three Rivers, Montana, Whitefish Lake, Montana, Glacier National Park, and back home via Butte, Montana, Yellowstone and the Tetons. If you’re thinking to yourself, “That must have been beautiful,” you’re on track with the topic of this podcast.

Beauty just may be the way to save our troubled world.

“One will observe,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas, “that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and better they are.”

While we hear the word “beauty” a great deal today—beauty products, beauty salons, beautiful people, “that fish was a beauty”—it’s safe to say that few people are thinking about beauty in the very Medieval way of St. Thomas, that the experience of beauty today is different than it was for Thomas’s contemporaries.

The question of the Medieval experience of beauty is one that Dr. Jason Baxter has been exploring this summer in a class for our friends at The University of St. Thomas and will continue to explore during the fall semester while he is on sabbatical.

In the past Wyoming Catholic College’s Byzantine chaplain, Fr. David Anderson has been a guest on The After Dinner Scholar so you know that our students are able to attend Byzantine Divine Liturgy regularly.

What you may not know is that while in the Western liturgical tradition, Mass can be celebrated without singing, in the Eastern rites, singing is mandatory.

Assisting Fr. David musically has been Prof. Christopher Hodkinson, Instructor of Music and Fine Arts who is also our Director of Music and our guest this week.

“Many people simply cannot believe that there can be a large, leisurely center to life where God can be pondered” wrote the late Dr. Eugene Peterson. “They doubt they can enter realms of spirit where wonder and adoration have a place to develop, and where play and delight have time to flourish. Is all this possible in our fast-paced lives?”

That 1994 article by Eugene Peterson was ironically entitled “The Good-for-Nothing Sabbath.” It had a profound influence on the way I thought about not only Sunday, but rest and leisure in general. It also served as the one of the first critiques I read of the modern American concept of time that sees each Sunday and holiday as nothing but “a day off” in the service of returning to work.

Dr. Kent Lasnoski here at Wyoming Catholic College has spent a good deal of time considering and writing about the Sabbath. And his concerns have only been amplified by the enforced fast from Sunday Mass and the sacraments due to COVID-19. We may have formed or enhanced some bad habits.

With the gracious blessing of our governor and our county officials, Wyoming Catholic College became one of the few schools in America to hold a face-to-face graduation.

On Saturday, May 23 capped, gowned, and hooded, thirty-six Wyoming Catholic College seniors received their Batchelor of Arts in Liberal Arts at an outdoor, socially-distanced ceremony. The night before at dinner—also outdoors and socially-distanced—college president Dr. Glenn Arbery addressed the seniors before presenting them with their iconic Stetson cowboy hats. Here is what Dr. Arbery had to say about their experience at Wyoming Catholic College and about our hopes for their futures.

Commencement was livestreamed for family and friends. You can watch it here.

In early March, Wyoming Catholic College canceled all on-campus classes and like most—if not all—other colleges in America sent students home to resume classes at a distance.

Now it’s one thing to have a college that specializes in distance learning and there are schools today with no campus and no resident students. It’s quite another to retool nearly a semester of classes from face-to-face learning to distance. Our faculty put forth an heroic effort and the semester finished well.

In that effort they were led by our Dean Kyle Washut and asked Dean Washut to talk to us about the successes, difficulties, and things learned from our experiment in undergraduate distance education.

“Right from the beginning liturgy and music have been closely related. Wherever people praise God, words alone do not suffice. Conversation with God transcends the boundaries of human speech; everywhere it has, according to its nature, called on music for help, on singing and on the voices of creation in the sound of the instruments. Not only man has a role in the praise of God. Worship is singing in unison with that which all things bespeak.”

That quotation is from Joseph Ratzinger’s essay, “The Image of the World and of Man in the Liturgy and Its Expression in Church Music,” an essay Wyoming Catholic College juniors recently read for the course “Music in the Western Tradition.”

On this podcast, their professor, Dr. Stanley Grove comments on that essay and the nature of music in worship.

On June 8, 1978, Alexandre Solzhenitsyn went to Harvard University and delivered his now famous commencement address, “A World Split Apart.” It was, to say the least, not what people expected—or wanted.

By the time he delivered the Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn had been living in the United States for some time, observing our politics and culture. In the address he offered a critique of our ideas of freedom and the good, of our sense of well-being, of our overall shortsightedness, and our lack of spirituality.

Wyoming Catholic College sophomores read Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement address as part of Trivium 202: Political Rhetoric and the Common Good. In that course they not only study great examples of rhetoric, but learn to write and deliver their own speeches.

With those students at home across the land, Drs. Virginia Arbery and Pavlos Papadopoulos recorded this conversation about Solzhenitsyn.

In the May 1991 issue of The Atlantic, poet Dana Gioia wrote, “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.”

Not only do we Americans not know our contemporary poets, we don’t read the poets of the past either. Poems are, for many of us, opaque. We simply don’t understand nor do we take the time to learn to understand, to appreciate, to love poetry.

With that in mind, Wyoming Catholic College president, Dr. Glenn Arbery has been on a mission: the revival of poetry. And he's begun a daily vlog on which he reads and comments on one poem a day: www.wyomingcatholic.edu/blog. Dr. Arbery is our guest on this episode of The After Dinner Scholar.

“You can kill people with sound," noted Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Then he went on, “And if you can kill, then maybe there is also the sound that is opposite of killing. And the distance between these two points is very big. And you are free—you can choose.”

This is, perhaps an apt commentary on mid-20th century classical music. In this lecture to Wyoming Catholic College juniors, Dr. Stanley Grove discusses the musical works of Pärt as well as John Cage and Krzysztof Penderecki. Sounds that kill, sounds that bring life, and in the case of John Cage’s “4:33,” no sounds at all.

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

With those lines, the Romantic Era poet John Keats (1795-1821) began “The Eve of St. Agnes”(available here). A beadsman was someone whose duty it was to pray for his benefactor, the beads being the beads of the rosary.

While he prays in the chapel, in the adjacent castle, Keats tells us, Madeline dreams of her love for Porphyro, her family’s great enemy. Later that night Porphyro arrives at the castle and finds his way to Madeline’s bedroom. She wakes from a dream, the two declare their love for each other, and they run off together.

Dr. Glenn Arbery and Dr. Tiffany Schubert got together—online of course—to discuss the poem for the benefit of Wyoming Catholic College juniors listening at home.

About 100 years ago, Frank Morison, an English journalist, set out to disprove the resurrection of Jesus by examining the facts. As a result Morison, the skeptic, came to believe that Jesus, the Son of God, crucified, dead, and buried, rose again to give eternal life. Morison’s book, Who Moved the Stone? is still in print today.

This being the Tuesday in the Octave of Easter, I thought of Morison’s experience as I listened to this week’s podcast—a conversation between Dr. Kent Lasnoski and Dr. Jeremy Holmes about faith and reason centering around Dei Filius, the dogmatic constitution of the First Vatican Council issued in 1870.

This document from the 19th century, we'll discover, speaks eloquently to our situation today.

St. Jerome famously said, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” Thus knowledge of the Scriptures is knowledge of Christ and the more we know Scriptures—assuming that our hearts are right—the more we will know Christ.

While reading through the Bible is of great value and scholarly study of the Bible is also of great value, the Medieval Masters developed a method of reading the Bible they called lectio divina—and it’s not just for monks in the Egyptian desert. It’s a mystical practice for all of us.

Dr. Baxter explains more addressing “How to Perform Scripture: Lectio Divina and Reading with the Heart” in this final session of “Into the Lenten Desert: Learning to Pray with the Medieval Masters” from Wyoming Catholic College.

Writing at TheCatholicThing, scholar David Bonagura, Jr. writes about Passion Sunday and the blessing and receiving of palms. It’s what we do, he says. Then he goes on, “But not this year. We will not be present to receive our palms, to hold them as the Gospel of Jesus’ triumphal ascent into Jerusalem is read, to make crosses out of them, to thread them through our crucifixes upon returning home. It is a Palm Sunday without palms.”

This year, Palm Sunday without palms will lead to Holy Thursday without our receiving the Eucharist, Good Friday without waiting on line to kneel and to kiss the crucified, and Easter without gathering in the dark to await the light and the resurrection. It is a strange and sad situation.

Here at Wyoming Catholic College, the sadness extends to the loss of our close-knit school community. Great gatherings for Easter brunches and Easter dinners will be limited to immediate family and groups of ten.

Last Friday, our academic dean, Prof. Kyle Washut spoke from his heart to the experience of our students, faculty, and staff. In doing so, he also, I suspect, speaks eloquently to you experience during this Holy Week. Here is what he had to say.

“The man who truly prayers,” wrote the fourth century monk Evagrios, “is the man who sees the place of God. This is what it means to be a theologian.”

This is lecture six in Wyoming Catholic College’s distance learning course “Into the Lenten Desert: Learning to Pray with the Medieval Masters” with Dr. Jason Baxter.

Following the example of St. Anthony, a steady stream of monks and hermits made their way into the Egyptian desert to seek God. Evagrios was among them, a so-called “desert father.”

In this lecture, Dr. Baxter looks at the writings of Evagrios and the sayings of the desert fathers in order to explain: “Praying with the Whole World: Evagrios and ‘Natural Contemplation.’”

“The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs,” writes biochemist Michael Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box. “Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.”

The science curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College pays close attention to the interaction between science, philosophy, and theology with the ultimate goal of achieving a coherent synthesis of faith and reason.

That includes looking long and hard at evolution and the various alternatives to time-plus-chance.

In Science 402, our seniors have just read Darwin’s Black Boxand while they’ve been studying at home, they listened to this conversation between their professors, Dr. Scott Olsson and Dr. Jeremy Holmes about Behe’s argument.

It's been said that God created man in his own image and man kindly returned the favor.

While the Scripture tells us that God saves with his strong arm, most of us understand that this is metaphorical language. God has no arms, legs, hands, feet, eyes, or ears. We know God by analogy because God in His Being is beyond our comprehension. He remains a mystery.

The mystic wants to know God not merely by analogy, but to experience Him in His Being and thus in the darkness of mystery.

In this lecture, “Dionysius the Areopagite and The Darkness of God,” Dr. Baxter explores the mystical tradition of the via negativa.