Past Courses

As a community, we’ve hosted a number of experiments in shared learning, beginning with reading Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness after our first Wednesday dinners. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been meeting virtually, allowing us to host discussions organized around great texts and ideas, facilitated by scholars from around the country. In this work, we are inspired by the Catholic Worker vision of the “agronomic university.” In Peter’s words, the agronomic university was to be a place where “the scholars could become workers, and workers scholars; where a philosophy of work would be restored to people; where they would regain a sacramental attitude toward life, property, and people in relation to them.”

See below for a sampling of the texts we’ve gathered around so far, and reach out if you’re interested in joining our Thursday discussions (5-6:15pm PST / 8-9:15pm EST, on Zoom, schedule below). In addition to our Thursday gatherings, we are hoping to offer our “Liturgy and Communion Economy” course again soon, in partnership with Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. Check out our Communion Economy page for more details.

2024: The Order & Beauty of the World

Syllabus here / Readings available here

This year of the agronomic university was devoted to contemplation of what Simone Weil calls “the order and beauty of the world.” In what will serve as the theme-setting piece, her essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” she points to an underlying affinity between science, art, religion, and personal love. Each involves our relationship with particular “images” or models of God’s creation as a whole – as beautiful, as coherent, as obedient, or as responsive to us, respectively. 

When we contemplate such images with attention, Weil claims they function as “sacraments”– even the cosmological and mathematical models that will be our focus. Like sacraments [from Greek, mysterion] proper, these images are icons of the mystery of Truth itself–functioning this way for us because of, rather than in spite of, their limiting particularities. 

With this potential in mind, we turned our attention to an eclectic set of images/models: from cosmology (ancient Roman, modern, and Biblical), geometry (Pythagorean, Byzantine iconography, and as applied ethically/spiritually), and “pattern language” as it is described by the architect Christopher Alexander.

2022-2023: The Bible Year

Syllabus here / Supplemental readings available here

This year was a guided read through of the whole of Scripture, from Genesis through Revelation. This class will have two key emphases: understanding Scripture by adopting modes of prayer and practice from our reading, and drawing out the covenantal, family-making dynamic in salvation history. 

The virtual classes included guided discussions on the week’s reading as well as presentations by guest scholars. In addition to our weekly Thursday class sessions, we also hosted an optional weekly prayer service on Saturday mornings. Some of the presenters who joined us included Dr Gary Anderson (University of Notre Dame), Dr Anthony Pagliarini (University of Notre Dame), and Dr Catherine Petrany (St Vincent College).

2021-22 Academic Year: Recapitulation

Check out our full calendar of readings here.

Sample readings:

Summer 2021

(Short pieces and films exploring themes related to The Brothers Karamazov and setting up our reading of After Virtue.)

Past Readings