In addition to our flagship Biblical and Catechetical School programs, we also offer several year-long Enrichment Courses. These do not require homework or tests, do not have small groups, and have no prerequisites, so anyone can enroll!
Online Enrichment Courses are open for anybody, anywhere in the world to join!
This course, developed and taught by Daniel Campbell, teaches the student all about the Christian faith and life. Following in the footsteps of the saints, we will read their classic works to understand how to live like saints ourselves: how to pray, grow in virtue, practice penance, and everything else mixed in!
The Holy Spirit is the “Gift that contains all gifts” (CCC 1082). But Who, exactly, is the Holy Spirit? How do we cultivate a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit? What is the Spirit’s role in the liturgy, in prayer, in our lives? This course will address these questions and more with a thorough exploration of Sacred Scripture and the tradition, liturgy, and prayers of the Church. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of the Divinity and personhood of the Holy Spirit, the actions of the Holy Spirit throughout salvation history, the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church and in the soul of the Christian, what the various gifts of the Spirit are and how to use them, and how to continually grow in our relationship with the Holy Spirit.
“All men by nature desire to know.” So begins Aristotle’s great philosophical work, The Metaphysics. But what is man? What is his relationship to nature? What does it mean to know? These fundamental questions are not only the concern of trained philosophers, but of all mankind. Philosophy then, defined simply as love of wisdom, is a universal and uniquely human activity. Through the study of philosophical development culminating in the perennial systems of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, this course will explore the purpose and method of thinking philosophically about the nature of reality, truth, and wisdom, which leads to the contemplation of God. By engaging in philosophy, students will also come to see the errors of modernity, where truth is abandoned, contrasted with the beauty of modern Catholic thought, where truth unites with faith. This course aims to capture what is described by the Second Vatican Council: “The intellectual nature of the human person is perfected by wisdom and needs to be, for wisdom gently attracts the mind of man to a quest and a love for what is true and good” (Gaudium et spes §15).
This course, developed and taught by Dr. Seth Fabian, teaches the student to read the Divine Comedy as Dante intended us to: as a work of practical literature for Christians striving to be more Christ-like…literally a guide to salvation. We will follow Dante’s footsteps and see how pride and selfishness create chaos on Earth and lead to Hell (Inferno), how the human soul purifies itself by learning to desire and love rightly (Purgatorio), and how our journey ultimately leads us back to our origin in the shared vision of our Creator (Paradiso). Lectures will focus on Dante’s portrayal of human desires and the consequences for good and ill of our daily choices. Above all, the class will examine a Catholic poet and his Catholic poem. The beauty of Dante’s poetry, the uncanny realism of his psychology, and his awesome descriptive powers are always in the service of his ultimate purpose: demonstrating Truth as revealed in the lived experiences of the souls he encounters in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The Divine Comedy is a call to conversion that demands a response from its audience, which will be the focus of class discussions. Let us use Dante as a lens to examine our daily choices and life-long aspirations!
The Scriptures exhort us to “be holy as the Lord your God is holy.” But what does this holiness look like and how can we attain it? In this class, developed and taught by Mr. Daniel Daniel Campbell, we will study God’s plan for our holiness and how His grace assists us in a life of holiness, especially through prayer and conversion. We will study the different kinds of prayer (liturgical, unceasing, vocal, and mental prayer) and how we are to pray – how to put oneself in the presence of God, the method of meditation, how to deal with difficulties in prayer (distractions and aridities, consolations and desolations, and other obstacles). We will also study conversion, the ordinary growth of union with God in the life of the baptized as we are drawn through the “three conversions” – justification, by which we enter the “Purgative Way”, the dark night of the senses, by which we enter the “Illuminative Way”, and the dark night of the spirit/soul, by which we enter the “Unitive Way”.
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to be the neighbors of the Holy Family? What it was like to knock on the door of Joseph’s house, as the child Jesus opens the door and greets you with “Shalom”? To see Mary cooking in the kitchen, rolling unleavened bread? This class, developed and taught by Dr. Alphonso Pinto, will be a series of theological reflections painting an approachable picture of the familial relationship of the child Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. We will explore Sacred Scripture, the Liturgy, reflections of popes, and writings of Church Fathers and Doctors regarding the early, hidden life of Jesus. We also see the implications for His salvific ministry throughout.
Theatre and the arts associated with it, especially music, have always played a pivotal role in the shaping of a culture. From Ancient Greece, to the Globe Theater, to the lights of Broadway, human beings have tried to express and understand their nature, Who God is, and the great questions of life through performance and ritual. Join Clare Nowak in this brand new Enrichment Course to study the history of theater and the arts, as well as some of the most influential playwrights in history. Learn how the beauty of the arts can help form a Catholic culture and life in Christ!
The Catholic Church has inspired the greatest art in the history of the world. Drawing upon the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Church has inculcated a sacramental imagination used to express faith tangibly in visual art, architecture, literature, and music. This class, developed and taught by Dr. Jared Staudt of the Archdiocese of Denver, will explore 2,000 years of Christian art, tracing its stages from its foundation in the early Church, to the splendor of the Middle Ages and the Baroque era, and its decline through the secularism of modern culture. The course will look at the major artists and masterpieces of Christian culture, as well as the historical and spiritual movements that shaped them.
This class, developed and taught by Dr. Jared Staudt, tells the story of the Church’s history through the lens of her major figures, events, and art. As a pilgrimage, the Church’s journey includes our own stories. We look to the saints as models for the Christian life in the world. The Church has shaped culture throughout her history, as the everlasting, heavenly city, the goal of our pilgrimage, giving us inspiration to shape our world in the present.
In his address to catechists concerning the New Evangelization, then Cardinal Ratzinger stated the following regarding the relationship between evangelization and happiness: “To evangelize means: to show this path [to happiness] – to teach the art of living.” The notion of an art to living that we are to pass on to others as the source of happiness has been lost in our post-modern culture that denies any certainty of happiness from a singular way of life. With this course, we will explore what the Catholic Intellectual Tradition has articulated as the art of living, as the true path to happiness. The course is a comprehensive presentation of the classical worldview for ethics, understood as the teleological pursuit of happiness through the acquisition and practice, by grace, of the natural and supernatural virtues. The course will be taught from the standpoint of both nature with the philosophers, preeminently articulated by Aristotle, and, this being the natural foundation to the grace filled life of Christ in the soul, supernature with the Church, preeminently articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. It is meant to propose to the students a different understanding of the moral life than that of modernity and systematically march through each aspect of such, detailing what each is and how all are interrelated, so that the student comes to understand that there is a rationally intelligible craft to life that will fulfill their telos. More broadly speaking, the overarching intent of the course is to examine what it means to think and act like a rational human being, and subsequently the same as it concerns the life of Christ in the soul for the grace filled Catholic.
