The After Dinner Scholar

The day after tomorrow is July 4th and the Semiquincentennial celebration. As we along with our fellow Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence, the driving emotion should be love for our country. Why is that the case and what does love for country mean?

Even in 1630 as the Massachusetts Bay Colony was being founded—and, in fact, all the way back to Adam and Eve—the notion as liberty as “doing whatever I want to do” and liberty as doing “without fear all that is just and good” have been and still are in conflict. Wyoming Catholic College president, Fr. Dcn. Kyle Washut has thought a great deal about the nature of liberty or freedom and with it the...

When the framers of the Declaration of Independence listed “self-evident truths,” they began with three truths that precede any sort of state: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet about one third of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners. Wyoming Catho...

While the Revolutionary War—as expected—ruined the economy, the lessons learned in the Colonial period, the habits of most Americans, and the entrepreneurial spirit of a new nation led to previously unheard of human flourishing and prosperity. Our guest this week is Fr. Robert Sirico, founder and president emeritus of The Acton Institute. Fr. Sirico has long been a defender of the free-market syst...

The French Revolution that began in 1789 like the American Revolution that began in 1776 were both revolts against a king and against despotic rule. Both sought the expansion of human liberty and both intended to form republican governments. But that’s where the similarity stops and the contrast between the American Revolution and the French Revolution could not be starker. What made the differenc...

General Washington served as Commander-in-Chief from July 15, 1775 to the end of the War for Independence and was relieved on December 23, 1783—eight and a half years. After that he served eight years as our first president—with all the attending problems of a new nation—from 1789 to 1797. And he was, as historian James Thomas Flexner titled his biography: Washington: The Indispensable Man. There...

The purpose of the Declaration of Independence, wrote Thomas Jefferson, was “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [in] terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we [were] compelled to take.” To make their case they called on “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” on a Creator who endows humans with “inalienable rig...

The Catholic Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries defended monarchy and so many assume that "the divine right of kings" was a Catholic idea. But it wasn't. So, if the Catholic Church didn’t teach the divine right of kings, what did it teach about civil government and what could that have to do with the Second Continental Congress of thirteen English colonies in North America declaring...

In his new book, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence, Hillsdale College professor Dr. Matthew Spalding writes,“We must know the Declaration if we truly are to love America.” This week, Dr. Spalding explains how that's the case and how the Declaration expresses the American mind.    

Ten weeks and two days from today, we will celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. In honor of that event and in order to think more carefully about this our “experiment in ordered liberty” two and a half centuries later, we welcome you to this, the first of ten special After-Dinner Scholar podcasts from Wyomi...

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, an...

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...

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 C...

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 insig...

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. Wit...

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 Co...

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...

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 P...

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...

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 K...

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 seni...

“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 Happ...

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 sn...

“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...