The After Dinner Scholar

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 t...

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 w...

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 w...

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...

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 Conce...

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 i...

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 b...

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...

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...

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....

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 Am...

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 in...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

“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....

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 environme...

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...

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...

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, D...

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. Bel...

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, Anikl...

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...