This weekend say three of our young siblings graduating from college: One each at University of Dallas, Thomas More College and the Pontifical College Josephenum.
From now through Wednesday when the baby gets baptised (with two of the new graduates serving as godparents) the population of the Darwin household will be fluctuating between 8 and 12, up from its usual 5. So posting is going to be fairly light -- especially as I'm going to be very, very busy on the days that I'm in at work this week.
In the mean time, if you haven't seen it already, do pay a visit to Jimmy Akin's site where he's received permission to reprint a very good short story titled "Through and Through" by Catholic science fiction and fantasy author Tim Powers. There's discussion of the story here.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
3 hours ago
4 comments:
How'd they like UD?
Is it quieter there now?
I hope that the baptism went well..you were in my thoughts and prayers yesterday...God bless!!
UD sibling speaking--I absolutely loved UD, and I really cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in a Catholic liberal arts education. Almost all of the faculty are extremely intelligent and enthusiastic; the college is solidly Catholic and has a hard-core commitment to the Western tradition. The core curriculum is large enough that the students have a significant common experience and gain a widely rounded education, but it's small enough that you can still spend a lot of time doing in-depth studies on your major.
The star of the core curriculum is the Literary Traditions sequence of four classes--Pagan Epic, Christian Epic, Comedy & Tragedy, and the Novel. This means that everybody who graduates has read (or, in some cases, pretended to read) Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Beowulf, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Austen, Melville, and Dostoevsky. (Slightly less celebrated, but perhaps even more formidable, are the four philosophy classes that everyone is required to take, including one upper-level elective.)
One the whole, UD is not as focused on evangelizing its students as I get the impression that some Catholic colleges are; certainly I know a bunch of Protestants who attended UD and were happy there. (Some of them even managed to remain Protestant.) However, both the faculty and students are on the whole very committed to being faithful Catholics (our lone Buddhist English professor excepted).
And the university owns a campus in the hills just outside Rome, where almost all the students spend a semester in their Sophmore year. They rotate professors between the Texes and Rome campuses, so the academics there are about as good as they are on the main campus--the students are rather more distracted, but that's a given. The Rome semester is just . . . I can't even *begin* to describe how great it is.
There are faults, of course--I encountered one truly bad professor in my time there, and a few indifferent ones. It's a small college, so it's prey to all the inbred silliness and infighting of small organizations, along with the peculiar sense of manifest destiny that comes of being not only True Believers but also the Last Bastion of Western Civillization. On the whole, though, most of the students and faculty are intelligent and reasonable people, and it was a joy to spend four years with them.
Basically, it's a wonderful college with stellar academics and great campus life; the only problem is that most of the graduates tend to come out sounding like brainwashed devotees. (The Core is mother, the Core is father. You will be assimilated.)
Thanks, Rose!
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