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FAITH AND MAGNANIMITY
Bishop Barron, College Celebrate 45th Graduating Class at Commencement 2019
“It seems to me that the entire purpose of the program here at Thomas Aquinas College is to produce magnanimous people, young women and men of great souls,” the Most Rev. Robert E. Barron told the 83 graduates of Thomas Aquinas College at Commencement 2019. Such people, he explained, are “capable of high moral achievement, willing and able to undertake arduous tasks for which they will rightly merit great honor.”
The Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles, Bishop Barron served as the principal celebrant and homilist at that morning’s Baccalaureate Mass of the Holy Spirit in Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel. He then presided at the ensuing Commencement ceremony, where he was the day’s honored speaker.
In an uncoordinated, providential display of thematic harmony, Class Speaker Benjamin Trull (’19) also spoke of magnanimity. “To know Christ is to come to resemble Him, and in resembling Him we come to join Him in being the light of the world,” he said. “In this respect, we must be noble-minded and magnanimous. In virtue of our education, we are responsible for putting on Christ and radiating His light to the world.”
As part of the Commencement exercises, the College honored Bishop Barron for his own magnanimous work, most notably in new media, by presenting him with the College’s highest honor, the Saint Thomas Aquinas Medallion. “His Excellency has worked tirelessly to proclaim, support, and defend the teachings of the Church,” Chairman of the Board of Governors R. Scott Turicchi read from the Board’s resolution awarding the honor. The Bishop, the resolution continued, has advanced “the mission of Christ on earth, particularly as an effective voice of the New Evangelization, bringing the salvific word of Christ to audiences that might otherwise never encounter it.”
Finally, in a fittingly magnanimous postscript to the ceremony, two members of this year’s graduating class, Tom Macik (’19) and Patrick Nazeck (’19), returned to the stage shortly afterward. There they took their oaths, and received their commissions, as officers in the United States Marine Corps.
Full Commencement coverage
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SUMMER OF LEARNING, EAST & WEST
College to Offer High School Summer Program on Both Coasts
This summer the Thomas Aquinas College High School Great Books Program will be available for the first time on the College’s new campus in Northfield, Massachusetts, 100 miles west of Boston.
“For 20 years, the Summer Program has drawn high school students from across the United States and abroad to our California campus,” says Director of Admissions Jon Daly. “This summer, we are looking forward to welcoming them in New England, too.”
Over the course of two two-week sessions, rising high school seniors will join members of the teaching faculty on both campuses for spirited conversation, engaging firsthand some of the best works of the past 2,500 years. They will read and discuss texts selected from the masters of the Western intellectual tradition, such as Plato, Euclid, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy and, of course, St. Thomas Aquinas. They will forge new friendships, delight in the give and take of rational argument, and pursue truth — which civilizes, ennobles, and liberates.
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VALUE AND EXCELLENCE
Recent Guides Praise College for
Academics, Affordability
• Forbes has named Thomas Aquinas College to the magazine’s list of “America’s Best Value Colleges.” Less than 10 percent of American colleges and universities make Forbes’ selective list, and among the Catholic institutions included, the College ranks in the top five. The business magazine also lists the school as No. 45 among all colleges and universities in the Western United States.
• College Factual, a statistics-based guide that aims to “help students find and get great deals on the best fit colleges for them,” has ranked Thomas Aquinas College within the top 1 percent in the United States — No. 8 overall — on its 2019 list of the “1,510 Best Colleges for the Money.” According to the guide’s editors, “Thomas Aquinas College's overall average net price, combined with a high quality education, results in a great value for the money when compared to other colleges and universities."
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FAITH IN ACTION: THE ALUMNI BLOG
Graduate School Edition
• Before enrolling at Thomas Aquinas College in 2014, Siobhan Heekin-Canedy (’18) deferred her admission four times so that she could achieve her lifelong dream of ice dancing in the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. She now pursues a master’s degree in international relations at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she is fulfilling another longtime dream: “a career in international relations, which began when I was figure skating … and traveling all over the world.” She recently published an article in the school’s online journal about Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and this summer she will be working as an intern at the Holy See’s Mission at the United Nations.
• In April Brandon Ristoff (’17) was the student speaker at the graduation ceremony for Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy. “In order for us to better serve others, we can’t only understand the quantitative side of public policy,” he said. “We must also place public policy into a historical and philosophical context.” This fall he will enroll at Loyola University Chicago, where he plans to pursue a second master’s degree, this time in applied statistics. “I want to use big data and statistics in analyzing different fields, especially politics,” he says. “I find it interesting using big data and statistics and combining it with the political philosophy I learned at Thomas Aquinas College and Pepperdine.”
• Jane Forsyth (’11) has won the 2019 Eleanor Clark Prize for best essay by a junior scholar, presented by the Robert Penn Warren Circle. A doctoral student in English Literature at the Catholic University of America, Miss Forsyth received the award at the Circle’s annual conference at the Kentucky home of its namesake, the late poet, novelist, and educator. Dr. Ernest Suarez, chair of Catholic University’s Department of English, reports that “the judges praised Jane’s essay … for its insights, originality, and stylistic elegance.” Writes Miss Forsyth, “Participants in the Robert Penn Warren Circle are united by their love for Warren and other critics who promoted ways of reading literature which attend to form and aesthetics rather than current theory or pragmatic concerns. … I was honored to receive this award from such an extraordinary group of academics.”
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Siobhan Heekin-Canedy (’18)
Brandon Ristoff (’17)
Jane Forsyth (’11) |
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ABOVE AND BEYOND
Parents Help to Raise $276,011
for 2019 Parents’ Day of Giving
For Thomas Aquinas College’s second annual Parents’ Day of Giving on May 1, the parents and grandparents of students past and present were challenged to raise $125,000. With four hours left to go in the day, they had surpassed that total.
“When two anonymous benefactors agreed to match all gifts up to $125,000, we thought that was an ambitious goal, given that our parents raised just over $100,000 last year,” says Robert Bagdazian, coordinator of the Thomas Aquinas College Parents’ Association. “If we had merely reached that goal, we would have been thrilled. But our parents went above and beyond.”
At 8:00 p.m., when the parents and grandparents — aided by alumni, many of whom made gifts in honor of their parents — had reached the $125,000 threshold, a member of the College’s Board of Governors intervened to keep the day going. Dr. Thomas Krause offered to match any additional gifts that came in before midnight, up to $10,000 total, raising the overall Parents’ Day of Giving goal to $135,000.
Once again, TAC families rose to the occasion. By day’s end, parents and grandparents had donated $141,011.35, which — when combined with the matching gifts — amounts to $276,011.35 in support of the College’s Annual Fund. That marks a nearly $100,000 increase over the 2018 total.
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