The After Dinner Scholar

Gothic cathedrals are certainly wonders of architectural imagination and engineering ingenuity. But, according to Dr. Jason Baxter, Wyoming Catholic College’s Assistant Professor of Fine Arts and Humanities they are far more than that.

"The Gothic Cathedral," says Dr. Baxter, "is architecture of contemplation. Born in the great age of the masters of the interior life, the cathedral gave physical shape to contemplation, but it also invited it, incited it, evoked it, performed it within. In a word, it created silence, a richness of experience that is wordless only because it is too deep for words."

“The liturgy,” wrote Fr. Romano Guardini, “is not a matter of ideas, but of actual things, and of actual things as they now are, not as they were in the past.” In order to understand the liturgy, he went on, we need to “discern in the living liturgy what underlies the visible sign, to discover the soul from the body, the hidden and spiritual from the external and material.”

Guardini was one of the towering Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century and a major influence on the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, and philosopher Josef Pieper. Yet in 1911, Guardini, for all his erudition, wrote a little book entitled Sacred Signs in which he gently and simply explained this connection between the material stuff of the Mass and the inner world of the spirit.

Dr. Kent Lasnoski, Assistant Professor of Theology at Wyoming Catholic College, received his Ph.D. from Marquette University, where he studied the theology of marriage and sexual ethics, that is, things both spiritual and physical. He has been teaching Guardini’s Sacred Signs to our freshmen and shares both his own and his students insights on the physical side of spirituality.

It’s a terribly misinformed, but common anti-Catholic trope: “Catholics,” it is said, “have to believe everything the pope says.”

Catholics do not have to believe “everything the pope says.” But, on the other hand, the Church teaches in Lumen Gentium, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, “In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent.” So while we don’t have to believe “everything the pope says,” when he teaches us as pope, Catholics are conscience bound, to accept his teaching and adhere to it with “a religious assent.”

What does that mean on a practical level as we hear or read papal sermons, encyclicals, exhortations, and other writings? What if we sincerely disagree with him? How do we sort it out?

John Milton’s Paradise Lost spans all of history from the fall of Satan and his angels to the creation of Adam and Eve, to the fall of man, to the cross of Christ, to the Second Coming. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, Milton scholar C. S. Lewis wrote, “Paradise Lost records a real, irreversible, unrepeatable process of the history of the universe; and even for those who do not believe this, it embodies…the great change in every individual soul from happy dependence to miserable self-assertion and thence either, as in Satan, to final isolation, or, as in Adam, to reconcilement and a different happiness.”

This week's guest, Wyoming Catholic College president Dr. Glenn Arbery, has taught Paradise Lost for many years and is currently working through the poem with our juniors.

Everything in this world changes and yet at the same time, everything seems to remain the same. That observation is hardly new. In fact, between about 625 BC and 450 BC the question of the nature of reality and the nature of motion and change were the primary focuses of the great thinkers of the era, thinkers we call the pre-Socratic philosophers.

This week, Dr. Michael Bolin, Assistant Professor of Theology and Philosophy who has been teaching the pre-Socratics to our freshmen here at Wyoming Catholic discusses these earliest philosophers and the ways in which they can help us understand our world and culture today.