Aquinas Institute in the Year of St. Paul

Our friend, Professor Peter Kwasniewski from Wyoming Catholic College, sends the following news:

We are very pleased to announce the launch of a new institute dedicated to the graduate-level study of the Catholic faith specifically through the writings of the Angelic Doctor: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, located in the beautiful town of Lander, Wyoming, along the Wind River Mountain Range. On our website you can find out all about us: www.TheAquinasInstitute.org.

A capsule summary: last summer a number of professors ran a graduate program in which the student participants read and discussed nearly the whole of the Prima Pars, using bilingual texts. Everything went so well that we decided we would like to do this EVERY summer, and so we have founded an institute for the study of sacra doctrina according to the writings and method of St. Thomas -- in particular, by reading the Summa theologiae in a serious and sustained way. Typically our plan will be to read almost the entire Summa over the course of three intensive summer programs dedicated to the Summa’s three parts. (Students are not necessarily required or expected to attend all three, although naturally it would be ideal for them to do so.)

This summer, however, we are making an exception to that plan by putting on a one-time program, in honor of the Year of Saint Paul, dedicated to reading all of St. Paul’s Epistles with all of St. Thomas’s commentaries on them. While it is possible that Aquinas’s commentaries have been studied as a group this way in a monastery or other rarefied setting, certainly no college or university in living memory has offered such a program -- an opportunity to be steeped in the wisdom of St. Paul’s corpus as a whole, as systematically interpreted by the greatest Doctor of the Church. The Aquinas Institute hopes to make available to participants bilingual editions of the commentaries to be studied.

The program will run from May 25^th to July 30^th, 2009. The teachers will be Dr. John Mortensen, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, Dr. Jeremy Holmes, Fr. Sebastian Walshe, and Mr. Marco Emerson. The deadline for applications is March 31^st. Information on tuition, housing, how to apply, etc., may be found at the above-mentioned website. Please help SPREAD THE WORD!