Intellectual Formation
Learn on your feet, not stuck in a seat
You won't fall asleep in the San Damiano classroom. Recovering an educational model from the days of St. Thomas Aquinas, San Damiano takes an active, dialectical, disputation-oriented approach to learning. Students come to class ready to stand and argue with each other and the faculty for or against important claims found in the greatest works written by the brightest minds and most passionate hearts of the western world.
San Damiano College for the Trades offers an integrated curriculum with no electives and no majors. Our liberal arts curriculum forms the mind through reading and discussing the great books—the greatest that has been thought and said by poets, philosophers, and theologians like Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Each course in theology and humanities features exemplars of discernment, prudence, and courage with saints’ lives and primary sources written by the saints.
Theology
12 credits
The Theology curriculum is taken over the first two years. Students immerse in Scripture to meet the God of salvation; encounter the best lives of the saints to imitate their prudence and generous abandonment to God; and disciple under the intellectual rigor of the scholastics to learn how to think and feel with the Church.
Courses and Required Credits
Humanities
12 credits
History moves but human nature remains the same. Students take four courses in the humanities during their first two years. Both poetry and prose are studied, from Homer and Dante to Shakespeare and Tolkien. Students learn the importance of story and myth—both true and false—and how culture is encapsulated in heroic tales.
Philosophy
3 credits
The Philosophy curriculum consists of one course taught in the first year. Using a mix of primary and secondary sources, this course introduces students to the practice of logic and the basic terms of perennial philosophy, namely the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition as synthesized and developed in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Integrated Art, Trivium, Business
12 credits
This integrated portion of the curriculum includes four courses that combine various liberal and technical approaches. We combine rhetoric and business practices, Euclid and architectural history.
Latin, Music, & Acolyte
12 credits
Students fulfil this course either by singing in the schola or serving at the altar as an acolyte. The Schola teaches Latin, as well as music history and theory under the guidance of the Norbertines. Acolytes will be immersed in the theology and practice of the liturgy by serving, sacristy work, and learning the rubrics and history of the Mass and Divine office.
Seminar
12 credits
The Seminar curriculum includes four interdisciplinary courses: one on the nature of narrative, that is, the shape of a story; one on the theory and practice of restoration in the broadest sense; and finally two seminars taken during the third year on moral theology and politics.
Required Non-Academic Courses
Building Arts
9 credits
This integrated curriculum of three courses (each 3 credits) offers technical skill in various trades and humanistic and theological reflection on the meaning of those trades for elevating the material, cultural, and moral character of the person, family, Church, and world.
Pilgrimage & Work of Mercy
4 credits
The pilgrimage curriculum includes two two-credit experiential learning courses, each of which takes the student on a threefold experience of preparation, the pilgrimage/work of mercy itself (travel, prayer, and penance), and a reflection on the pilgrimage.
