What is the West? Stepping onto most college campuses today, it is something to be reviled rather than defined. The Italian scholastic Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) is often most credited with arguing for a harmony of human reason and divine revelation as leading to truth, and the use of reason in approaching divine texts. Revelation allows for the existence of an objective moral truth and the basis for why existence functions as it does. Aquinas was far from the only thinker to take this approach to theology and philosophy. Lesser-known to most in the West today, the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) and the rabbi-physician Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) approached the pursuit of truth much as Aquinas did. Now, a new master’s degree program at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is not only preserving the Western tradition but also bringing it back to life.
St. John’s is a Great Books college, and something all-too-rare in today’s higher education. Adopted in 1937, the college’s core curriculum includes reading “foundational texts of Western civilization.” Over the course of a four-year degree and “close reading of 200 great books across 3,000 years,” students read Greek tragedy from Aeschylus, the comedy of Aristophanes, the Hebrew Bible, Plato, and the works of Blaise Pascal. Last month, St. John’s College announced the launch of a new Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Classics program, offering students the opportunity to study classical medieval texts from Islamic and Jewish traditions alongside Arabic and Hebrew.
Attacked by both the left and the right, this approach to education is exceedingly rare today. The left has waged a war to eradicate the West as a defined civilization from college classrooms for years. Back in 1987, figures like Jesse Jackson led marchers at Stanford University to throw out its “Western culture” program. On too many campuses, the works of pop singers like Taylor Swift and racial theorists like Ta-Nehisi Coates are better known among students than those of Dante or Euclid. Disenchanted by intellectualism, the right is similarly dim. Conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk’s book The College Scam makes a popular case that higher education itself is empty and corrosive. Demonized and silenced by one side and ignored by the other, the soul of the Western tradition has few places left to breathe. But St. John’s College is building its lung capacity.
Medieval Jewish and Muslim classics are more “Western” than many realize. The 10th-century Persian philosopher Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi wrote extensively on the Aristotelian tradition and echoed Plato in his own work about an ideal political system. Students reading the poems of the Jewish poet Judah Ha-Levi (1075-1141) and the Persian mystic Rumi (1207-1273) will be exposed to Judaism and Islam beyond identity politics, but rather as spiritual paths and traditions that interacted with the medieval and Renaissance Western tradition. St. John’s associate dean, David Carl, stated that “these texts are not marginal or secondary writings and once stood at the center of the West’s intellectual life … alongside the classics of ancient Greece and modern Europe.”
Beyond reintegrating classics from medieval Judaism and Islam into the Western canon, St. John’s approach is arguably more transformative because of how it handles the process of teaching. St. John’s College President J. Walter Sterling stated that:
Students don’t just encounter two religious or intellectual traditions—they encounter one another…through slow reading, shared inquiry, and serious conversation, they begin to see the common questions at the heart of both traditions—and perhaps, the shared humanity at the heart of all education.
Whether St. John’s College is aware of it or not, they are reviving a philosophy of education that originates in the Renaissance, and involves a subtle re-sanctifying the curriculum in both material and delivery.
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The new works and thinkers that St. John is incorporating widely share the assumption of the existence of God and a divine presence in the universe. Such ideas are taboo across the vast majority of American college classrooms, but nonetheless have positive implications for how students approach other ideas about politics, science, and ethics when these grander ideas of transcendence are embedded at their core. Not only that, the slow reading of physical books, discussion, and argument in a face-to-face seminar setting re-humanizes. The educational experience. These elements of metaphysics and humanism are suddenly brought back to life in the New Mexican desert.
Something that is potentially amazing is happening at St. John’s College. Not only is the college maintaining its rare gem of a Western great books curriculum, but it is also deepening it in a way that is spiritually meaningful and socially empathetic. For far too long, conservative proponents have only been able to hold up Michigan’s Hillsdale College as an example of higher education done right. American universities do not need another “conservative” campus; rather, they need more of the right philosophy of education. St. John’s College is taking a step in the right direction with this new program. And to answer Charlie Kirk, it is not a scam. Instead, it is a search for truth that happens to be in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Image: St John’s College in Santa Fe by Capt Swing on Wikimedia Commons
I enjoyed your reflection on the St. John’s experience, David. I was a student of the Santa Fe SJC Graduate Institute in the late 80s, finishing my degree in 1988. At the time, I was working as a technical writer/editor at Los Alamos National Laboratory; I had to juggle work, commuting two hours a day, while raising two sons as a single mom. In other words, it wasn’t easy. Receiving my GI master’s degree was one of the happiest moments of my life. In retrospect, the deep discussions, the delving into great books of the Western World, the atmosphere of St. John’s itself – these were life-changing gifts. I have gone on to a writing career, creating novels and nonfiction. As I begin a week of Summer Classics(Neitche) this month, I recall my very first St. John’s College experiences with gratitude.
We are only a pale shadow of St. Johns, but our experience has been similar: our graduates go on to do whatever they want to do. Sometimes they go on to more advanced degrees; sometimes they go to work. Whatever they choose, they are better-prepared for having been exposed to the Great Conversation. They can be lawyers, doctors, writers, business managers, teachers, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, even welders. Whatever they choose to do, they are prepared to do it with more savor, more appreciation, having absorbed the lessons of the past.
Gordon S. Jones
Founder/Faculty
Mount Liberty College
Great school! I’m glad Mount Liberty College is available and it’s much less expensive!
The liberal arts Great Books idea needs to open up for the emerging World Culture. Middle Eastern Classics, sure. Is there an Indo-European world in a meaningfu way? I suspect so.
And don’t forget, bring in foreign students to leaven St. John’s, and keep it solvent.
SJC has been bring in world wide students for some tears now. update your knowledge
My comment was in reference to the very recent difficulties in bringing in students from foreign countries due to Trump.
“Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Classics”
And what, exactly, is one supposed to do with such a degree?
The children of the idle rich need not worry about such, but for everyone else…
People who know how to do things but not how to think are more easily manipulated than those who can think. Utilitarian thinking always leads to the reduction of human worth. What value is an unborn child if they can’t do something? What value is a human worker replaced by a robot? An elderly disabled vet can do less than someone healthy, so what is their value? Marxism and fascism are both utilitarian, these thinkers are not. And you would be surprised how Latin helps in law, Greek helps in medicine, and Arabic and Hebrew help in business.
I am not rich, but I have lived a very meaningful 30 years after attending college at St. John’s. One of the most salient arguments for attending St. John’s College that this article wasn’t crafted to demonstrate is that the overwhelming structure of the curriculum is scientific with a strong emphasis on learning to make scientific observation and then build reproducible experiments with mathematics requiring an understanding of general statistics and on to calculus. Does it make you a mathematician? Not by itself. Does it make you a physicist . . . sometimes. I would say the same, even about a curriculum that simply taught welding. Does a strict curriculum supporting a career as a welder make a welder? There is a high probability that when you finish the program, you are capable of welding, but career choice is rarely a straight line for students.
I spent 4 years as a student at St. John’s facing my own inconsistencies and trying to determine how I would be a better human than I could have been before. I recognized cornerstones in my cultural bias and I learned to rebuild my world view in the full knowledge that the greatest minds of the world did not just immediately understand the forces of nature or their own shortcomings.
I also learned that “getting a job” requires a great number of skills and I have gone on to study in many fields only to find myself working in the open source software communities building software (operating systems specifically) where effective writing and complex systems analysis that I learned at St. John’s has made me an impactful architect in a global economic market.
Thank you for sharing. My son is at St. John’s and thriving there. It’s a financial stretch for me and worth every penny for the reasons you articulated so well.
SF 2002 UNDG: Well said, David—I completely agree. The scientific and mathematical journey of discovery at St. John’s was both eye-opening and foundational for me. I entered SJC with a strong love for math and science, drawn to the idea that there was always a “right” answer to a problem. What I didn’t expect was how deeply the program would expand that framework—showing me why the answer was right, how it was derived, and what it actually meant.
After graduating, I took a Calculus II course at a state university. During one class, I asked a group of six students what the number we had just solved for meant. None of them could explain it. I could—and not because I had memorized a formula, but because I understood the progression of thought behind it. I could trace the intellectual lineage from foundational ideas all the way through to Einstein’s insights. That moment crystallized the value of my St. John’s education: I wasn’t just solving problems—I understood their significance.
Equally transformative were the language, communication, and writing skills I developed—tools that have shaped every job, interaction, and decision I’ve made since. For me, the fusion of analytical reasoning and clear communication naturally led to a career in Market Research. Today, I interview industry experts, collect and interpret data, identify meaningful trends, write reports, and present findings to help investors and businesses make informed, actionable decisions.
St. John’s gave me the intellectual confidence and curiosity to ask better questions—and more importantly, to seek understanding rather than just answers.
Dr. Ed asked, “what, exactly, is one supposed to do with such a degree?” The answer, in my opinion, is anything. It’s not a straight shot—nor should it be. A liberal arts education like St. John’s doesn’t train you for just one specific job; it prepares you to think critically, write clearly, ask better questions, and adapt across fields. That flexibility is a tremendous asset in a world where career paths are rarely linear.
I didn’t know at the time that I would end up in Market Research, but the ability to distill complex ideas, engage in deep analysis, and communicate insights effectively came directly from the SJC approach. I’ve seen peers go on to become doctors, lawyers, sales directors, educators, writers, technologists—you name it. The common thread isn’t the industry, it’s the capacity to think, connect ideas, and keep learning.
That’s what this kind of education gives you. Not a rigid career track—but a durable framework for building a meaningful, resilient, and intellectually engaged life.