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Prayer, Scholarship, and Fun at St. Thomas Day 2023
California
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January 30, 2023
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Students at Thomas Aquinas College, California, celebrated their patron saint last Friday with prayer, scholarship, and joyous fellowship at the annual St. Thomas Day festivities.
The day began with a community Mass in Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, offered by this year’s visiting lecturer, Rev. Stephen Brock, Ph.D., a noted scholar of St. Thomas at the University of Chicago. In his homily, Fr. Brock reflected on the importance of humility from a Thomistic perspective, commending, especially, St. Thomas himself, who embodied “excellence with humility, desiring only to serve God and souls.”
Mass
After a brief brunch, faculty and students convened in St. Cecilia Hall for Fr. Brock’s lecture, entitled, “Free Choice: What It Is Not, and What It Is.” The scholar led listeners through the arguments of modern atheists, Sam Harris in particular, opposing the notion of free choice, and built a Thomistic case for why free choice is not only real but beautiful. Fr. Brock and the College’s faculty and students then deepened their engagement with the subject in a lively Q&A session in the Dillon Seminar Room.
That evening, all celebrated the feast with a formal dinner in St. Joseph Commons.
Dinner
The day culminated with a beloved campus tradition, Trivial and Quadrivial Pursuits. The student body divided into three themed teams and played a version of Trivial Pursuit built entirely around the College’s integrated curriculum. The teams, judged by a panel of tutors, competed to answer questions, often with a sophistical bent and a hearty dose of culinary bribes for their judges!
Trivial-Quadrivial Pursuit
This years’ themed teams were “Calvin & Hobbes,” led by Isaiah Martinez (‘23); the Divine Comedy, led by Esther Reuhle (’23); and Noah’s Ark, led by Michael Bishop, (’23). To begin the event, each team made a grand entrance, replete with fanfare and tomfoolery. First came a campy (yet respectful) flood narrative, followed by a heated debate between a boy and his tiger, and then an abbreviated play-by-play of Dante’s magnum opus — in which St. Thomas Aquinas himself, looking remarkably like Steven Kirk (’23), appeared to round out Dante’s journey to paradise.
The game then began in earnest, with sophistry expounded and bribes exchanged, but the ultimate victory went to Miss Reuhle’s Divine Comedians. The winning team dug into a delicious after-party, furnished with classy snacks, celebrating their victory in the Dumb Ox Café — an apt location!
The day ended with good cheer and smiles all around. St Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!
