The Year 2020/21

We are thankful to God for one more year in which students enjoyed the Augustine College programme and flourished. The college moved into a new space at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Anglican Church this year. Heating, lighting and painting are finished, the old hardwood floors have been refinished, the library is now in place and fully catalogued thanks to a librarian friend, the classroom and office are working well. We have yet to install a kitchen and renovate the balcony upstairs but we were able to hold in person classes because of the small class size and the new location that allowed for social distancing. Students lived in two houses in the Glebe, 25 minutes walk away from the college, a time for good discussion of the day’s topic. This year’s students formed an exceptional friendship and understanding of each other.
Covid experience

The College has endeavored to keep students and staff safe with Covid restrictions this year. The students maintained their isolation as much as possible so that community and support for one another could continue through the year. Only one student developed a mild dose of corona virus towards the end of the year. She was cared for and isolated in residence. No one else tested positive.

Finding students

The College invested funds and time in a promotional film by Godzspeed and an ad campaign this year. Dr. John Patrick, students and others spoke about the college in the film; some very appealing ads were placed on social media, and yet there has been no increase in applications. It is hard to understand, especially when we know that students find the programme so enjoyable; challenging, but worthwhile. Please send us your ideas on how to find students. We know that personal, face to face contact, with time to discuss the programme, brings us students, but this is difficult in Covid times.

Augustine College

Almost 25 years ago Augustine College was founded by a group of university professors who understood that the university was failing students. The ideas of David Jeffrey and others are important: “The desire at Augustine College is to understand the logos, source of all knowledge, wisdom, truth and love… a foundational education which, in earlier times, characterized Christian higher learning so that our graduates are productive in the life of their church and in the world… The Augustine College programme is a training for the mind and heart, a rigorous and profitable training of richness, integration and un-shyness about matters of truth. We read from the works of the great thinkers, the story of ideas and their consequences in the Bible, literature, philosophy, art, music, science and medicine in order to provide a coherent picture, not a piecemeal collage, of the story of our history; the doctrines and theories that have endured to produce lives of virtue and character… We have a common, community goal in which faith is central to our identity. Faculty and staff are believers from different churches. Our statement of faith is the Apostles’ Creed.”

The College Crest is the Shield of Faith Eph 6:17, depicting the Cross of Christ, the Open Bible, the Quill as the sign of a writer, the Lamp of Learning, the Hart as the swiftest, most beautiful deer.
The College Motto is Credo ut intelligam, “I believe, in order that I may come to understanding.” This is Anselm of Canterbury’s summary of Augustine’s Christian philosophy of education from the 12th Century and is our commitment to maintain coherence between rationality and belief.

Roz Brain, a 2006 Grad, from Australia and currently in Australia working virtually in South Asia, wrote to us this week.

I miss my cohort from 2005-06, yes, every one of you, and faculty, too, and I miss the learning environment.

Augustine was a year of many emotions for me as an adult student. After 25 years of parenting, I was a full-time student and I loved it! It was a year of eyes opening to how the history of the world interfolds with the history of our faith and in this way my dreams for this course were more than fulfilled. During this year I intentionally developed the daily habits of Sabbath, solitude, memorization and study, and these practices continue to enrich my life… Since 2008 it has been my joy to volunteer in Nepal and surrounding countries of South Asia. I offer the young leaders of these countries, counselling, support and mentoring, and continue to learn about living cross culturally. I wonder if any of you realised that my first experience of living cross culturally was surprisingly in Ottawa. And as I remember those times, I thank God for every awkward experience that trained and equipped me for the work I do.

The future of Augustine College

We have debated whether we should run the eight month programme next year with less than 10 students. We are wondering about running an online programme. We are thinking of conferences, seminars and talks for other groups, people in ministry, politics, business, and education. Faculty and staff are convinced we should continue, and so we will. We ran a day conference in June on Zoom instead of the usual summer conference for physicians – recordings are available in exchange for a donation to Augustine College.  It was well attended and so this is something we could repeat for others. The college can also be used by other groups in its downtown location. There are lots of possibilities if we have funds and volunteers to help us.

And the future of our culture

Augustine College remains unapologetically counter-cultural. Reading and discussing texts of great thinkers, past and present, helps form our curriculum, our thinking and the discussions among faculty, staff and students. We engage the woke society; we discuss the meaning and philosophy behind the various issues of today – multiculturalism, tolerance, abortion, euthanasia, racism, autonomy, liberty and bureaucratic control. Patrick J. Deneen writes about this,

“Liberalism dismissed the idea that there are wrong or bad choices… The logic of choice applies to… the family, [and] all the more to the looser ties that bind people to other institutions and associations in which continued membership is subject to constant monitoring and assessment of whether it benefits or unduly burdens any person’s individual rights… Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.

“Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy… except that the anarchy that threatens to develop… is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. Liberty, so defined, requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships—from the family, church, and schools to the village and neighborhood and the community broadly defined—that exerted strong control over behavior largely through informal and habituated expectations and norms… informal expectations of behavior that were largely learned through family, church, and community… At the same time, as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are increasingly felt to be residual, arbitrary, and oppressive, motivating calls for the state to actively work toward their eradication through the rationalization of law and regulation.

“Liberalism thus culminates… in the liberated individual and the controlling state… In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a near-universal pursuit of immediate gratification: Culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past toward the end of cultivating virtues of self-restraint and civility, instead becomes… oriented toward promoting a culture of consumption, appetite, and detachment… Socially destructive behaviors begin to predominate in society… extreme license invites extreme oppression.

“The ancient claim that man is by nature a political animal and must in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. [Cultural problems are not] technical problems to be solved by better policy!”

Patrick J. Deneen, Unsustainable Liberalism, August 2012
See also Gary Saul Morson, Suicide of the Liberals, October 2020

Please join us in prayer for Augustine College, our students, faculty and staff, and for our culture.

May God bless you,

John and Sally Patrick