For those of us in St. Louis this weekend brings a great opportunity – the chance to explore, for free, the possibility of diving seriously farther into the faith by obtaining serious, meaty, thought provoking graduate level theology … in person, from excellent theologians, straight from the heart of the Church.
Unique and Exciting
The program is a unique format – over the course of three years you will meet once a month, in person, for basically an entire weekend with the professors and the rest of your class. You receive the assignments for the month, and then repeat the cycle next month. Five class weekends per semester, two semesters per class year, three years for the program. When you complete the program you’ll receive a Master’s in Pastoral Theology from the Ave Maria University Institute of Pastoral Theology.
It’s intense, difficult, and enormously rewarding. Our class is just over half-way through the program, this being the second weekend, second semester, of our second year (oh that’s a weird bit of symmetry).
The Heart of the New Evangelization
The program itself is serious, and the exact opposite of watered down. Right in the thick of the New Evangelization, the IPT provides the intellectual framework to understand the development of Christianity – triumphs, struggles, and all – from the beginning to the present day, with a particular focus on how that has danced with society over two+ millennia.
What a love-hate relationship!
Sometimes hostile, sometimes embraced, sometimes simply “complicated”, you’ll learn much that will help you understand how we’ve gotten to where we are today, where as serious Catholics we are most often “strangers in a strange land”.
The Best Part
With all that as preparation, this program equips you to seriously engage in reclaiming the world – all of it, from genetics to the law, from politics to the arts … absolutely all of it – for Christ.
This is the essence of the New Evangelization, to present the enduring Gospel once again to a world that has grown cold, indifferent, and all too often openly hostile.
Check It Out
This weekend provides the opportunity for you to sit in on any or all of the classes. Meet the professors, talk to current students, hear the lectures … get a feel for what the program could be like.
Classes are held in the Cardinal Rigali Center. If this sounds even the least bit intriguing, I’d encourage you to come sit in on as much as you’d like. Here is a bit more information.
I did this two years ago and was hooked … applied, joined the program, and am enormously grateful.
For more info email ipt@avemaria.edu, call 866.866.1100, or simply contact me one way or the other … we’d love to have you come by and check it out!
