Episodes
Tuesday Feb 23, 2021
Laughing at Perfection with Mr. Kevin Milligan
Tuesday Feb 23, 2021
Tuesday Feb 23, 2021
It may be hard to believe, but the Catholic Church has a patron saint of humor: Philip Neri who noted that, “A cheerful and glad spirit attains to perfection much more readily than a melancholy spirit.” And my observation is that we can become cheerful and glad people as we laugh.
Last week The After-Dinner Scholar featured Wyoming Catholic College senior, Miss Amanda Johnson, talking about her theologically rich oration about horsemanship as an aid to restoring our fallen humanity.
This week senior Kevin Milligan discusses his philosophically rich oration was entitled: “Laughing at Perfection: A Classification of Laughter and a Defense of Its Role in the Natural Perfection of Man.”
Tuesday Jan 19, 2021
The Ancient City and the Modern State with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Tuesday Jan 19, 2021
Tuesday Jan 19, 2021
Regarding the civilizations of ancient Rome and Greece, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges wrote in 1864, “What we have received from them leads us to believe that we resemble them. We have some difficulty in considering them as foreign nations; it is almost always ourselves that we see in them. Hence spring many errors.”
The ancient city, writes Coulanges, was in essence a religious association. The gods of each city, the soil of each city, and the people of each city were unique. Thus the only civic conceivable was the city.
Then something changed. Or rather multiple things changed.
Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos uses Coulanges book The Ancient City as a way of bridging how citizenship was understood in the ancient world of Plato’s Athens or Coriolanus’s Rome and how citizenship came to be understood beginning with Augustine’s City of God. Dr. Papadopoulos is our guest this week.
Tuesday Nov 17, 2020
The Civic Virtue of Thanksgiving with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
Tuesday Nov 17, 2020
Tuesday Nov 17, 2020
“First of all, then,” St. Paul wrote in 1Timothy 2:1-4, “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.”
We might have expected St. Paul to tell Timothy to pray “for kings and all who are in high position, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.” But he goes beyond that, urging that thanksgivings “for kings and all who are in high position.” That seems a bit peculiar or at least unexpected given that in AD 64, when St. Paul wrote this epistle, the Roman emperor was Nero who, among other violent and perverse behavior, ruthlessly persecuted Christians. Give thanks for him?
Here at the college there have been discussions with political philosopher, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos about thanksgiving as a civic virtue—something incumbent on us not only as Christians, but as citizens. With our annual national celebration of Thanksgiving coming up, we continued the conversation as a podcast.
Tuesday Sep 29, 2020
The Constitution, Philosophy, and Pope John Paul II with Judge Leon Holmes
Tuesday Sep 29, 2020
Tuesday Sep 29, 2020
In an op-ed column in USAToday last week, Wyoming Catholic College senior Anthony Jones wrote: “I gathered with the entire student body of Wyoming Catholic College on Sept. 17, 2019, for a mandatory celebration of Constitution Day. We began with the Pledge of Allegiance, witnessed a lively panel discussion between professors on the history and modern relevance of America’s founding principles, and concluded by singing patriotic songs.”
Anthony Jones went on, “If you are a student at a typical American university, that description probably sounds foreign to anything you have experienced. Anti-Americanism has spread across college campuses like a wildfire, igniting rage and resentment against anything perceived as oppressive — even the American flag. As a result, most universities would likely shy away from a celebration of our nation’s founding in favor of more ‘inclusive’ events.”
On September 17 of this year, Anthony along with the rest of the student body of Wyoming Catholic College as well as faculty and staff gathered to celebrate Constitution Day 2020.
This year we heard from retired federal judge, Dr. Leon Holmes. Judge Holmes received his PhD in political science from Duke University and his JD from the University of Arkansas School of Law. He served sixteen years on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Retiring from the court earlier this year, Judge Holmes is a visiting professor this fall at Wyoming Catholic College.
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
Lecture: "Beauty is Truth: Shattering the Medieval Vision" by Dr. Jim Tonkowich
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
Tuesday Aug 25, 2020
Duke University professor and philosopher Alex Rosenberg began an essay on Scientism with a series of questions and his answers:
- Is there a God? No.
- What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.
- What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.
- What is the meaning of life?
- Why am I here? Just dumb luck.
- Does prayer work? Of course not.
- Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?
- Is there free will? Not a chance!
- What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
- What is the difference between right and wrong, good or Bad? There is no moral difference between them.
- Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.
- Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.
At this year’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, Dr. Tiffany Shubert began by talking about the Medieval cosmos, a cosmos full of meaning, harmony, and truth. And last week’s After Dinner Scholar podcast was her lecture about the Medieval cosmos.
Next, we held a seminar discussing Alex Rosenberg’s essay “Scientism Versus the Theory of Mind” with its opening series of questions and answers. Before the seminar began, to avoid unnecessary intellectual whiplash, Dr. Jim Tonkowich spoke about how we got from a reality filled with the presence of God and with purpose to Rosenberg’s comment that, “Reality is the forsightless play of fermions and bosons producing the illusion of purpose.”
Tuesday Aug 18, 2020
Tuesday Aug 18, 2020
In the Epilogue to his book The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, C. S. Lewis wrote, “I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old [Medieval] Model [of the universe] delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect; it was not true.”
Last week the annual Wyoming School of Catholic Thought was held here in Lander. The topic was “Beauty is Truth: Science and the Catholic Imagination.” Our readings in science and in literature considered this question of how we see the world, how we image it even before we think about it.
That began with a look at Medieval science and cosmology. The group read and discussed chapter 5 and the Epilogue from Lewis’ The Discarded Image guided by Dr. Tiffany Schubert who offered this introduction to the topic.
Tuesday May 12, 2020
Tuesday May 12, 2020
On June 8, 1978, Alexandre Solzhenitsyn went to Harvard University and delivered his now famous commencement address, “A World Split Apart.” It was, to say the least, not what people expected—or wanted.
By the time he delivered the Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn had been living in the United States for some time, observing our politics and culture. In the address he offered a critique of our ideas of freedom and the good, of our sense of well-being, of our overall shortsightedness, and our lack of spirituality.
Wyoming Catholic College sophomores read Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement address as part of Trivium 202: Political Rhetoric and the Common Good. In that course they not only study great examples of rhetoric, but learn to write and deliver their own speeches.
With those students at home across the land, Drs. Virginia Arbery and Pavlos Papadopoulos recorded this conversation about Solzhenitsyn.
Thursday Mar 12, 2020
Thursday Mar 12, 2020
“I have a divine sign…,” said Socrates in his Apology. “This began when I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.”
Mysticism is hardly a Christians-only domain. And in fact the Medieval Masters learned a great deal from the Greek pagans, particularly Plato.
In this third lecture in the distance learning course “Into the Lenten Desert: Learning to Pray with the Medieval Masters,” “Pagans Grope Toward God: Piety and Prayer in Classical Antiquity,” Dr. Baxter explores the connections between Greek philosophy and mysticism and the Christian tradition in which we stand today.
Tuesday Jan 07, 2020
Time: Thick, Deep, High with Dr. Jeremy Holmes
Tuesday Jan 07, 2020
Tuesday Jan 07, 2020
We celebrated Epiphany last Sunday. We will celebrate the Baptism of Jesus next Sunday then the following Monday we begin “Ordinary Time.” There’s something going on here—actually many things going on here—that cannot be summed up with Google Calendar and a wristwatch.
Google Calendar and wristwatch time is what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “secular time”: It’s 10 AM. I have a meeting at two this afternoon. The corporate quarter ends on January 30. The year is 2020.
But is that all there is to time? Is it merely an empty expanse of moments that we fill or is there—as Taylor suggests—something more to time, something that, as he puts it, gathers and reorders secular time?
Dr. Jeremy Holmes has thought a great deal about the nature of time and is our guest this week on The After Dinner Scholar.
Tuesday Dec 24, 2019
The Abolition of Man, Part Three: "The Abolition of Man" with Dr. Jason Baxter
Tuesday Dec 24, 2019
Tuesday Dec 24, 2019
In his book, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis imagined a reader saying, “You say we shall have no values at all if we step outside the Tao. Very well: we shall probably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them. Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.”
That quote is at the end of the second chapter of The Abolition of Man our Wyoming Catholic College book of the year. In that chapter Lewis argued that the Tao or Natural Law is essential for any morality, any sense of “ought to.” But what if we throw away morality? What if we allow no ought, no permanent values, nothing but what we as humans choose for ourselves in any given age?
That question leads to the third and final part of the book and the final abolition of man. In this, our third podcast about The Abolition of Man, our guest is Wyoming Catholic College’s Academic Dean, Dr. Jason Baxter.