“At a typical college, the teacher knows nothing about what his students have studied.  Even if students are required to take “core courses,” those core courses are taught so differently from year to year that the teacher can’t depend on them for anything.  But at WCC, when I teach juniors, I know exactly what they have read and talked about for the past three years.  Every course they have taken has been crafted to line up behind what I am doing now and to support it.  It’s like a martial artist, who gets the strength of his entire body behind one punch:  in the WCC curriculum, every time I teach I have the strength of the entire curriculum behind me.  It’s an amazing way to teach—and a powerful way to learn.”

“The most important reason that I teach at WCC is the students. Their enthusiasm for learning across the liberal arts, for the humanities, for philosophy and theology, for the natural sciences, for all of their studies, is a wonderful thing. Teaching isn’t just about delivering a lecture; it’s about being part of a community that cultivates the pursuit of truth among both teachers and students, and if the zeal for that wanes, so does the joy of teaching. I haven’t experienced another community quite like what we have here at WCC. It’s truly exceptional.”

When I first fell in love with the Church, I was swept off my feet by the Latin language, and have been chasing after her ever since. The staggering breadth of Latin’s literature; its precision, expressiveness, euphonic charm; the equal freshness of prose written 200 or 2000 years ago; the oddities and blemishes your Latin teacher didn’t want you to know about; all assured me that there was something fundamentally true about the Church’s claims of universality, apostolicity, and sanctity. For me, learning Latin wasn’t about memorizing meaningless patterns or analyzing the so-called logic of language, but about falling in love with the Church, who happens to have used Latin for a very long time. I am at WCC because, here, all of my teaching can be ordered, finally, not only to the confines of a semester’s content (e.g., the particular theorems we will prove or explore), but to my students genuinely falling in love with a particular aspect of reality or mode of discovery, be it mathematics, natural science, philosophy, or Latin. Falling in love with these avenues of truth inevitably leads to happiness.