The After Dinner Scholar

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...

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 t...

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 i...

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 h...

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 priva...

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...

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 expres...

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...

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...

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 Cathol...

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...

“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...

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 fres...

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...

“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...

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 s...

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—g...

“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:...

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, witness...

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 figurati...

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, S...

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...

…[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 su...

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...