The After Dinner Scholar

”Nativity” by John Donne with Dr. Glenn Arbery

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.

Christmas Poems with Izzy Ecoff, Gregory Bowman, Catherine Stancliffe, Elizabeth Shepherd, and Jonathan Alllen

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 world. Christians have been writing poems about the First Coming of Christ as a babe in Bethlehem for two thousand years.

As a Christmas gift to you, our listeners, on this podcast Wyoming Catholic College students share from that treasury of Christmas poetry.

Caesar, Virgil, and The Aeneid with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

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 the empire beyond

the Libyans and the Indians....”

It’s no surprise that Virgil wrote such extravagant praise of Caesar Augustus into his epic. After all, Caesar Augustus gave him the job of creating the founding myth of the Roman Empire that had supplanted the Roman Republic.

As he has been teaching The Aeneid to our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos has been thinking a great deal about that transition.

The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception with Dr. Kent Lasnoski

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 Conception and Wyoming Catholic College theologian Dr. Kent Lasnoski joins us to shed a bit of light on the subject.

”Fathers and Sons” with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

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 is a position that played well in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, but which seems a bit out of place in farm country.

Dr. Tiffany Schubert has taught the novel to our Wyoming Catholic College juniors and tells us a bit more about the book.

How and How Not to Be Happy with Dr. J. Budziszewski

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 book, How and How Not to Be Happy.

Dr. Budziszewski lectured at Wyoming Catholic College on the topic of that new book and was kind enough to join us for this podcast.

The Truth About Sparta with Dr. Stephen Hodkinson

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 the International Sparta Seminar and founder of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies. And in 2010 he was awarded Honorary Citizenship of modern Sparta for his contributions to Spartan history.

He is also in Lander visiting his son, Wyoming Catholic College professor Christopher Hodkinson and kindly tells us about Ancient Sparta.

Articles by Stephen Hodkinson can be found here.

 

”Markmaker” with Mary Jessica Woods

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 it would be best to let Mary Jessica Woods tell us more about the story.

To order Markmaker by Mary Jessica Woods, click here.

Lumen Gentium and All Saints’ Day with Prof. Kyle Washut

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.”

Perhaps by happy providence, perhaps by cunning design, back in 2017, Wyoming Catholic College professor Kyle Washut was teaching the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium to our seniors just in time for All Saints Day. Here is what he had to say.

The Exodus and the American Imagination with Dr. Virginia Arbery

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 American colonists, the founders, and African-Americans, and others.

Dr. Virginia Arbery has an abiding interest in  story of the Exodus and our American imagination.