Ronald P. McArthur

Dr. Ronald P. McArthurIn 1970, Dr. Ronald P. McArthur made an enormous leap of faith. Leaving his home and a good job behind, he moved some 400 miles to become the founding president of Thomas Aquinas College — an institution which, at the time, had neither a campus, money, nor students.

Mission & History

Thomas Aquinas College came into being in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a time of great tumult in the United States that deeply affected the country’s institutions and its mores. The College’s founders, a seasoned group of lay Catholic educators, were concerned about the declining condition of higher education and, in particular, Catholic higher education.

Lecture: How To Read Poetry

By Michael J. Paietta

 

Poetry is an imitation of human action or thought whose end is to please or delight by moving the passions. By poetry, I am including not just the narrow sense of it — the sense which includes metered verse — but the broader sense which includes imaginative literature.

The problem most people have in reading poetry is that they tend to read it for its doctrine. They ask: “What is this author saying; what’s the teaching here, what’s the argument?” I submit that this misses the point of what poetry is all about.

R. James Wensley

R. James WensleyWhen R. James Wensley first came to know Thomas Aquinas College, it was as a seeker. A trained engineer and the retired CEO of the Capstone Turbine Corporation, his educational background was mostly technical in nature. The notion of a great books curriculum was foreign to him. Yet he found the idea intriguing; he wanted to learn more about it.

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