The After Dinner Scholar

The After Dinner Scholar episodes:

• 04.16.2024

  Dante's Divine Comedy - 2 with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  Last week Dr. Tiffany Schubert discussed Inferno, the first book of Dante’s Comedy. Our friend and former colleague Jason Baxter remarked that in Inferno, “Dante’s poetic violence is meant to melt down the hard heart so that it can be...

  
• 04.09.2024

  Dante's Divine Comedy - 1 with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh— the very thought of it renews my fear! It...

  
• 04.02.2024

  Easter Joy with Dr. Jeremy Holmes

  Pope Benedict XVI wrote, "At Easter we rejoice because Christ did not remain in the tomb, his body did not see corruption; he belongs to the world of the living, not to the world of the dead; we rejoice because...

  
• 03.26.2024

  The Four Last Things in Holy Week with Dr. Kent Lasnoski

  Saint Ephrem the Syrian said, “We give glory to you, Lord, who raised up your cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of...

  
• 03.19.2024

  Biology, Theology, and Philosophy with Dr. Daniel Shields

  The Catechism of the Catholic Church (159) declares Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason...

  
• 03.12.2024

  On the French Revolution with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

  Observing the French Revolution, British Member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, noted, “But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Over the...

  
• 03.05.2024

  Contemplating Nature with Dr. Stanley Grove

  It’s been a strange winter here in Lander, Wyoming beginning with nearly two feet of snow on Thanksgiving—of which about fourteen inches fell between four and eight PM. Another foot or so just before Christmas and nothing but dribs and...

  
• 02.20.2024

  "Are Video Games Fine Art?" with Gregory Bowman

  The new Apple Vision Pro headset, we’re told, “delivers fun and rewarding gameplay for players of all skill levels. Players can dive into games on the App Store that transform the space around them, use an Environment for a more...

  
• 02.13.2024

  "No Pain, No Gain: The Radical Nature of Sacrificial Love" with Moira Milligan

  January 31 to February 2 the Wyoming Catholic College community enjoyed days packed with senior orations. Each senior, having written a thesis in the fall, presents his or her findings in a 30-minute lecture followed by questions from a faculty...

  
• 02.06.2024

  The Eucharist and Wyoming Catholic College with Dr. Jeremy Holmes

  This podcasts is "about the Great Books and the liberal arts," something that sets The After-Dinner Scholar apart from other audio blogs from Wyoming Catholic Collage. Case in point, the college has launched a new podcast entitled “The Eucharist with Wyoming...

  
• 01.23.2024

  About Infinity with Dr. Scott Olsson

  The number of integers (1, 2, 3, 4, and so on) is infinite. And oddly enough so is the number of even integers (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and beyond). Meaning that the number of even integers is equal to...

  
• 01.16.2024

  Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  “I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures,” remarks Anne Eliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. “None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.” It is always...

  
• 01.09.2024

  Freshmen in the Snow with Mr. Karl Eby

  While you and I sit by a delightful fire—or at least (assuming you live in a cool climate)—delightful central heating, our Wyoming Catholic College freshmen are spending a few nights in their Quinzees: giant mounds of snow, hollowed out to...

  
• 01.02.2024

  Aristotle on Friendship with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

  “Social connection,” wrote U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in  his May 2023 “Advisory on our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” “is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter. Throughout history, our ability to...

  
• 12.26.2023

  A Christmas Week Full of Martyrs with President Kyle Washut

  This podcast was posted on December 26, the day after Christmas. It was the commemoration of St. Stephen’s martyrdom described in Acts chapter 7. On the 27th, we remember St. John, the only apostle who was not martyred. The 28th...

  
• 12.19.2023

  Pondering the Incarnation of the Divine Son with Dr. Jeremy Holmes

  During the first weeks of Advent, the Church directs our attention to the second advent of Christ, that day when he will come again in glory to gather his people into his resurrection, remake this tired, sinful world, and set...

  
• 12.11.2023

  Music at Christmas with Mr. Paul Jernberg

  The music coming over the air—for those who still listen to the radio—and in various Christmas mixes from Pandora, Apple Music, Spotify, and so on tends to be a wild and wooly mix including everything from “O Holy Night” to...

  
• 12.05.2023

  Virgil’s ”Aeneid” with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  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...

  
• 11.28.2023

  Jesus Christ, King of the Universe with Dr. Kent Lasnoski

  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...

  
• 11.21.2023

  Giving Thanks with President Kyle Washut

  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...

  
• 11.14.2023

  Captain Ahab and ”Moby Dick” with Dr. Virginia Arbery

  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...

  
• 11.07.2023

  ”The Merchant of Venice” with Dr. Adam Cooper

  The quality of mercy is not strained.It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath. It is twice blest:It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomesThe 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...

  
• 10.31.2023

  ”Leisure the Basis of Culture” with Dr. Michael Bolin

  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...

  
• 10.24.2023

  Science and Scientific Knowing with Dr. Scott Olsson

  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...

  
• 10.17.2023

  Teaching the Old Testament with Dr. Jim Tonkowich

  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...

  
• 10.10.2023

  Learning to Write Well with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  “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...

  
• 10.03.2023

  Homer’s ”Iliad” with Dr. Glenn Arbery

  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...

  
• 09.26.2023

  Fall Outdoor Week and Rafting the Canyon of Lodore with Mr. Paul Milligan

  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...

  
• 09.19.2023

  Aristotle’s ”Nicomachean Ethics” with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

  “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...

  
• 09.12.2023

  Wyoming Catholic College’s New President with Pres. Kyle Washut

  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...

  
• 09.05.2023

  ”Be Transformed”: Matriculation Address by President Kyle Washut

  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...

  
• 08.29.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology: Nathaniel Hawthorne ”The Birthmark” with Dr. Virginia Arbery

  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...

  
• 08.22.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Wendell Berry by Dr. Daniel Shields

  “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...

  
• 08.15.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Heidegger’s ”The Question of Technology” by Dr. Glenn Arbery

  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,...

  
• 08.08.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  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...

  
• 08.01.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Gulliver’s Travel to Laputa by Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  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...

  
• 07.25.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Bacon’s ”The New Atlantis” by Dr. Paul Giesting

  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...

  
• 07.18.2023

  ”Nature and Nature’s God” with Dr. Daniel Shields

  …[W]hatever is in motion must be put in motion by another,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae, “If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must...

  
• 07.11.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Early Moderns by Dr. Paul Giesting

  In the early 1990s—a mere thirty years ago— America Online was launched into cyberspace and the Hubble Telescope was launched into outer space. These have changed our lives. And it’s an odd parallel to two technological advancements from the Middle...

  
• 07.04.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Genesis and Exodus by Dr. Jim Tonkowich

  Genesis 1 tells us, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” As the college’s 2023 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought considered “The Ancient and Modern Challenges of...

  
• 06.27.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--”Prometheus Bound” by Dr. Virginia Arbery

  Now have we journeyed to a spot of earthRemote-the Scythian wild, a waste untrod.And now, Hephaestus, thou must executeThe task our father laid on thee, and fetterThis malefactor to the jagged rocksIn adamantine bonds infrangible;For thine own blossom of all...

  
• 06.20.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Ancient Greek Wisdom by Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

  In the Phaedrus, Plato wrote about writing that, “it will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories, they will trust to external written characters and not remember of themselves.” It seems almost beyond believing that...

  
• 06.13.2023

  The Ancient and Modern Challenges of Technology--Introduction: Hephaestus by Dr. Glenn Arbery

  Hephaestus was the Greek god of technology. Unlike Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and the others who were unspeakably beautiful and strong, Hephaistos talks in Homer’s Iliad about “my own brazen-faced mother, who wanted to hid me, for being lame.” Wyoming Catholic College...

  
• 06.06.2023

  Grads and Cowboy Hats with Dean Kyle Washut

  Like all graduating seniors, Wyoming Catholic College seniors look forward to baccalaureate robes, degrees, and moving their mortarboards tassels from, right to left. But much more than the typical academic regalia, our seniors look forward to being awarded that most...

  
• 05.30.2023

  Graduation 2023-Remarks by Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila

  The 2023 Wyoming Catholic College graduation speaker and recipient of the college Sedes Sapientiae award was Most Reverend Samuel J. Aquila, the archbishop for the Archdiocese of Denver. His words were realistic about the challenges we face as a culture and...

  
• 05.23.2023

  Graduation 2023-Senior Address by Miss Emma Hermanson

  Each year the Wyoming Catholic College senior class chooses one of its members to deliver a speech at graduation. The Class of 2023 chose Miss Emma Hermanson. Before coming to Wyoming Catholic College, Emma Hermanson spent her high school years at...

  
• 05.16.2023

  Graduation 2023: The President’s Address by Dr. Glenn Arbery

  This past Saturday, May 13 began what we’ve come to call our graduation triduum, three days of celebrating the achievements of ther Wyoming Catholic College Class of 2023. Graduation weekend begins with the senior dinner on Saturday evening—seniors, faculty, and staff...

  
• 05.09.2023

  Much Ado About Much Ado with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

  BENEDICK                                But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had...

  
• 05.02.2023

  Sacred Music and Renewal with Mr. Paul Jernberg

  There was a time not too long ago when every church had a church choir. Ordinary people knew how to sing parts and often tackled difficult pieces of music with wonderful results. At Wyoming Catholic College, the choir loft in our...

  
• 04.25.2023

  St. Thomas on Providence with Dr. Michael Bolin

  “We know,” St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, “that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” Those words from St. Paul can and should comfort us. Nothing happens in...