1. Thomas More College offers an integrated, four-year program of studies in the liberal arts, humane letters, and the disciplines of philosophy and theology, for which it awards the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts (B.A.L.A.).
2. Students also have the option of enrolling in the two-year Associate of Arts in Liberal Arts (A.A.L.A.) program. This degree was created especially for those B.A. students who discern a calling to professional studies, specialization in the sciences, the religious life, or the trades, or who simply wish to conclude their undergraduate studies in the liberal arts. The degree corresponds almost exactly to the first two years of the College’s Bachelor of Arts, and the sequence of courses constitutes the equivalent of a “Foundations of Western Civilization” program. Students who complete the A.A. may be readmitted at a later date to continue on to the B.A.

Please see True Enlargement of Mind and the College Catalogue for more information.

The average person changes careers four times, and less than half of college graduates actually “use” their specific major. Moreover, no single “major” subject will sustain you on your life’s journey. Thomas More College offers you an education that prepares you not only for your first profession, but for your whole career. It is an education that does more than equip you for the workforce—it prepares you for life. Our Liberal Arts program is not an education of limitations, but of immeasurable opportunities.

Thomas More College defends a common education that allows students to study together, discover the beauty and order present in nature and human life, and to crown their studies contemplating the highest things. It is an education that gives you a broad and agile mind and the character capable of navigating the unforeseen—and inevitable—changes of the future. We believe that the “great books” approach that produced leaders over the last 3,000 years is more relevant than ever today. Thomas More College seeks to produce souls prepared for life, not a narrow specialty.

Thomas More College again looks to St. Thomas More when we offer students the opportunity to “concentrate” their studies. Mainly intended for those students desiring to prepare themselves for graduate school, concentrations enable students to hone their liberal education and formation of heart and mind along the following avenues:

Scripture and Theology

Through this concentration, students will be formed in theology rightly understood: “a discipline rooted in the study of sacred scripture and modeled upon the example and teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.” In this concentration, students will further develop their ability to read scripture intelligently and will grow further in their understanding of and ability to communicate God’s revealed truth. Moreover, students will appreciate with our patron that the purpose of theological study is not only to understand God’s revealed truth but, ultimately, to come to enjoy our ultimate good: eternal life with God.

Literature and Humane Letters

To be human and to live a human life means to be enveloped in God’s loving providence, to be placed within an ordered whole replete with both meaning and mystery. Through the study of “Literature and Humane Letters,” students further develop their ability to see reality: to appreciate the particular, the concrete, and the tangible, and to grasp the universal which is made visible in and through these concrete realities. Such a study enables us to learn from the past, act rightly in the present, and order the future. Both fiction and fact reveal that there are no truly private actions, that, as Richard Weaver reminds us, “ideas have consequences.” Tracing ideas and their consequences in literary and historical studies, the student hones his critical faculties, nurtures his moral imagination, and cultivates his capacity to discern and evaluate the character and judgment of others. In the process, the student is led to a greater love and understanding of the workings of grace in everyday life and the nature and goodness of the order God has made. As Hopkins reminds us, “Christ plays in ten thousand places . . . To the Father through the features of mens’ faces.”

Statesmanship and Moral Philosophy

To lead is to judge and order wisely. To be able to do that, a man must know the truth about the good and the corresponding hierarchy of goods; he must understand and love the truth of the whole order of things and accurately apprehend his own place and role – with his responsibility – in it. The student in this concentration learns the intimate connection between order in the soul and order in society; students will understand that the greater the share of virtue in a people, the more likely is the achievement of the political common good of justice and a humble share in happiness. Students will refine their knowledge and their ability to communicate both the truths about human action and happiness as well as the truths about the political order and the common good. With Thomas More, they will realize that genuine freedom and happiness is possible only within the divinely intended order.

In order to achieve a concentration, which will appear on the student’s transcript, 3 of 4 tutorials plus the Senior Thesis must be in the discipline of the concentration. (The fourth tutorial and the JP can be in any other discipline.) The student must make his intention “to concentrate” known in writing to the Dean no later than the beginning of the second week of the fall semester of the senior year.

The adventure undertaken at Thomas More College will set your heart free to live life well and bring creativity, beauty, and ordered ideas into the world. A liberal arts education not only forms you, but also prepares you for a broad range of careers. Our graduates have done this through their vocations as teachers, artists, lawyers, computer analysts, financial managers, religious, business executives, parents and in many other worthwhile pursuits. The Catholic great books program at Thomas More College is not a tool for any one career, but a key to unlocking many. We view our education as a success every time a graduate goes forth with the commitment to goodness and truth and the desire to serve God and his fellow man.

Studying the most brilliant minds of human history develops the habits of thought and action that allow you to rise above the ordinary in all pursuits.

With a liberal arts education from Thomas More College, you will grow in your ability to think, reason, adapt, and communicate. You will develop an agility of mind, sound leadership qualities, strong character, and an enriched soul. And more importantly, you will be prepared to live a good life in the fullness of Truth. A liberal arts education broadens your outlook so you can think and act freely. It allows you to understand and to pursue a life based on the wisdom of our ancestors. It develops a love of your soul and a sense of wonder over creation. It is an education springing from ancient sources that continuously renews you. A liberal arts education frees you to seek the Truth.

The Program of Studies at Thomas More College is a rigorous training in the liberal arts, humane letters, and the disciplines of philosophy and theology. The entire program is designed to help our students to “put on the mind of Christ” (Philippians 2:5) by forming them in human and divine wisdom and by preparing them for a life of service to the world as eloquent witnesses to the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Wisdom, as Cardinal Newman put it, is that “clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God.” It is, in other words, the habit of right thinking and judgment that comes from the reasoned-out knowledge of God as first cause and final end of all that exists. Human, or philosophical wisdom is attained after an arduous ascent that begins with the beauty and intelligibility that the senses discover in the world around us and proceeds to what our mind can apprehend of spiritual goods, the soul, and God. The liberal arts, and especially the art of logic, are the necessary equipment for such a course of study, which must be “rigorous,” “coherent,” and “systematic” if it is to result in authentic knowledge (Fides et Ratio 4). For the Christian, human wisdom yields to divine as its completion and judge, as from revelation we receive the principles of Sacred Doctrine, and from the Holy Spirit the gift of infused wisdom which is the inheritance of every confirmed Christian. In conformity with the constant teaching of the Magisterium, the wisdom that theology promises is to be sought first in the reverent, careful reading of Holy Scripture in light of the commentaries of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and the decrees of Ecumenical Councils and Popes, and afterwards in the discipline of theology proper. And this learning, in order not to be sterile or unreal, must take place within a community of prayer that understands the Sacred Liturgy to be the privileged place of encountering the Truth about man, the universe, and God.

The search for Truth naturally leads to the desire to rejoice in and testify to theTruth one has attained. Thomas More College embraces the Church’s teaching that a Catholic education should lead its possessors to “try to communicate to society those ethical and religious principles which give full meaning to human life” (Ex corde Ecclesiae 33). By giving her students a true and integral humanistic formation, Thomas More College enables them to contribute to the evangelization of culture. In an age of cultural dislocation, such a formation must include not only reflection upon the principles of the good life, but also a course of study–almost an immersion–in the great works of Classical and Christian culture and in the lives and writings of the saints, so that the student’s imagination and desires may be shaped in accord with what is truly good and beautiful. This humanistic formation is guided by philosophical and theological ethics and employs the tools of the traditional arts of grammar (through the study of one of the great Classical languages), rhetoric, and poetics. Such a formation, culminating in the Tutorials, Junior Project, and Senior Thesis, leads to a kind of eloquence in its possessors, who become ambassadors of the gaudium de veritate, the joy in the truth, that is a Catholic education’s characteristic fruit. Like the great Christian humanists throughout the ages—from St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine to St. Thomas More and Blessed John Henry Newman—the Thomas More College graduate rejoices to have been given the great task of serving the world by communicating the saving truth of the Incarnate Word.

In The Idea of a University, Blessed John Henry Newman coined the phrase “true enlargement of mind” to indicate the excellence at which a liberal education aims, explaining that it is a “power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence.”

Although he elsewhere refers to such a power as characteristically “philosophical,” it is plainly both the knowledge of architectonic principles and the familiarity with the substance of the various arts and sciences of which a liberal education is composed, including such pursuits as history, literature, rhetoric, mathematics, and the study of the natural world.

To a Catholic, of course, such an education includes—and as its ruling part—a sufficient quotient of Sacred Doctrine to enable the student to join Newman in affirming that faith is “an intellectual act, its object truth, and its result knowledge.”

To the end of specifying a common standard of true enlargement of mind, the President and Fellows declare that the graduates of the College’s program of studies should be able . . .**

1. To read Latin or Greek at the intermediate level of proficiency.*
2. To express themselves in clear, cogent, and persuasive spoken and written English.*
3. To offer a thoughtful and careful analysis of the meaning and structure of an English poem.*
4. To recognize pattern, harmony, symmetry, and order in works of nature and art.*
5. To know the difference between knowledge and opinion, and to know when a proposition is held from experience or as the result of argument from prior principles.*
6. To demonstrate an understanding of the principal themes, figures, literary and artistic works of Western civilization, to situate them in their historical context, and to see and set them in conversation.*
7. To give an account of the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church and Western civilization to the major Eastern cultures and religions.
8. To give an account of the way in which nature acts for an end, and to be able to distinguish between the philosophy of nature and modern empirical science.
9. To argue from common experience to the nature and immateriality of the human soul.
10. To explain what is meant by happiness.
11. To explain what is meant by the common good.
12. To give an account of the various meanings of the term “wisdom”—speculative and practical, philosophical and theological, acquired and infused.
13. To give an account of the way in which theology is a science.
14. To demonstrate familiarity with the history of salvation narrated in the books of the Bible, and to grasp the ways in which “the New Testament is hidden in the Old and the Old Testament unveiled in the New.”*
15. To articulate and defend the mysteries of the faith contained in the Creed.

**The seven TEM standards applicable to the A.A.L.A. degree program are marked with an asterisk.