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.