Throughout this website you’ll discover both the expected—our mission, Program of Studies, co-curricular activities, etc.—as well as the unexpected, including traditions that have been part of our community for decades.

We welcome the opportunity to introduce Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts to you and invite you to go deeper, exploring what you find here but also planning a visit to campus or participating in a live online visit.

Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts calls her students to a transformative liberal education of the whole person.

This education is ordered to human flourishing and communion, animated by the perennial questions, given shape by the classic books, and nourished by a vibrant liturgical and sacramental culture.

Joyfully Catholic in this ascent toward true freedom and a vision of the Good, Magdalen College calls all within her community to enter the great conversation of authors seeking wisdom that has unfolded across the ages, cultivating a life of virtue, poetic imagination, service, and life-giving fidelity.

Magdalen College offers a liberal education for greatness. This may be a public greatness that human history will mark within its records or the quiet, hidden greatness that sustains families, societies, and the world, just beyond the vision of others. This greatness gives form to a life transformed, one in which students find true freedom, joy, and the wisdom that transcends our age.

Through its deep integration of liberal education and the Catholic faith within a joyful community, Magdalen College offers students the opportunity to pursue wisdom in a spirit of friendship, animated by a communion of faith, bringing the intellect and imagination to their full realization. Our community is unlike any other.

At Magdalen College we educate our students not only for the lives they will live immediately following graduation, but also for the lives they will live two decades later. When our graduates step into the leadership of public, private, and ecclesial institutions, or lead quietly in the private spheres of life, they will be taking up the reigns that will shape and sustain society and the Church through the next generations.

It is for these high and heroic callings that we educate.

The vision of liberal education that animates Magdalen College is irreducible to one of its aspects. It is a complex reality embodied by its students and its teachers over a lifetime, a reality in which the whole is always greater than its parts and in which the human longing for transcendence finds its voice.

We invite you to explore our website to discover the extraordinary education we offer.

An Integrated Liberal Education
Our Program of Studies
The Program of Studies at Magdalen College offers a path to joy that can only be found through knowing in its most complete sense. Aristotle, in recognizing that “all men desire to know,” discerned something in human nature that comes from the created image of God rendered at the deepest core of every human being, something that is universal.

This desire is not for facts or for information, but a desire for wisdom, an encounter with the real, the permanent things, the reality that constitutes both the realms of becoming as well as those of being. This includes things that are the fruit of the intellect and the imagination, of human action and human making, and the things that elude us at the horizon of transcendence where reason and faith meet as wings to lift us ever higher. This desire to know is a gift, one that summons students and teachers to an active engagement in the journey and the joyful gift of ourselves to others. These in turn become manifest in a desire for communion in knowing, one in which students, teachers, and the authors from each generation of human culture participate in a dialogue ordered to the highest Wisdom. We know that Mary is called the “Seat of Wisdom” and here any distinction between the secular and the sacred melts into a unified call to transcendence, a call to conversion that leads us from Plato’s cave, guiding us toward the Good, toward the Wisdom that is the author of all Being. As Pope Saint John Paul II recognized, if we are to encounter and receive wisdom, we must give primacy to enquiry, and the animating principles of our enquiry must be the perennial questions, the fundamental questions about life’s meaning. But we are not relativists or skeptics: with great humility and with the recognition that the fullness of knowledge will always elude us, we insist—against the powers of this age—that we can know.

These three things—the primacy of enquiry embodied in the perennial questions, the classic books and greatest artifacts of culture read as a three-millennia conversation, and the belief that truth can be found—form the animating soul of our Program of Studies.

But make no mistake, our quest will not be satisfied by a syllogism alone. There are aspects of reality that exceed what the powers of discursive reason can comprehend. Thus, our journey through the Program of Studies will integrate the powers of ratio with the powers of active receptivity, echoing Josef Pieper’s emphasis on intellectus, and Louise Cowan’s on the poetic imagination. The meaning of the highly contingent, often discordant, realities that constitute so much of learning may not be harmonized or revealed in this lifetime. Some of Plato’s most important dialogues conclude with a “myth” for a reason.

Thus, the Program of Studies calls students and teachers alike to a transformation through the deep receptivity of the greatest works of culture, works that shed light upon existence and reveal ever-increasing realms of meaning. Liberal education, as embodied by the Program of Studies will expand and enrich both the intellect and imagination, inculcating a resistance to the rationalist tendencies of reduction and oversimplification, tendencies that breed ideologies and human catastrophe. Our world today, including every single person, needs this form of liberal education now more than ever.

Though education takes place at the undergraduate level for four years, we know that learning naturally lasts throughout the fully human life. The fundamental orientation that the Program of Studies offers students will, for those who give themselves to the quest, be sustained in the pursuit of Wisdom through a life of human flourishing. Then, at the end, the desire to know will be transfigured and fulfilled. When, no longer seeing through a glass darkly, we may see “face to face.”

Human Flourishing, Self-Knowledge, and Postgraduate Life
As our mission statement above indicates, the mission of the college is an integrated one, consisting of a primary academic dimension and a spiritual dimension. The latter nourishes and orients the academic dimension while providing the animating principles of the larger collegiate culture and its ultimate purpose. Though these two aspects may be distinguished conceptually, in the lived experience of our community they are one. The natural outgrowth of this mission is a collegiate culture characterized by integral formation for human flourishing oriented to vocation through the free giving of self: “Man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself” (Gaudium et Spes § 24).

This “discovery of [one’s] true self” finds one of its most ancient imperative expressions in the ancient Greek aphorism “know thyself, ” a Delphic maxim inscribed in the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. This call to self knowledge echoes and is transfigured within the theological expression of Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 22, the passage of that document cited most frequently by Pope Saint John Paul II, one of our co-patrons:

“The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.”

Thus, the quest for self-knowledge, a primary source of liberal education in its classical articulation, finds its expression in a key document of the Church’s most recent ecumenical council, a council that also gave birth to Magdalen College and its integrated mission.

Very often, those who are sympathetic to these purposes express doubts about their practicality in our current age. How will students who receive such an education–no doubt extraordinary in itself–find their way professionally in postgraduate life? Part of our answer is to be found in our Career Pathways Program. Through this program, one that takes place during the summer recess and evening seminars during the academic year, the college prepares students for internships and pre-professional programs, coaches them in developing their resumes and preparing for interviews, offers professional seminars in the skills needed to succeed professionally, and assists students in landing their first job after college. The college sees this as not only the right thing to do for our students and their families, but also as a logical extension of our mission: to launch faithful, well-formed students into our culture who will live their faith in the world as wise and generous citizens.

Within the pages of our website, you will find detailed descriptions of our great books curriculum, our majors, our Catholic collegiate culture, and what Saint John Paul II called the “perennial questions” that form the heart of our collegiate activities. In these pages you will find an integration of the very best of the “great books” tradition—its devotion to the reading and discussion of primary texts—with the strengths of Catholic humanistic studies.

The education we offer at the college is not for the faint of heart: the journey to freedom— intellectual and spiritual freedom—is an adventure. But no one at the college undertakes this journey alone. The students, the faculty, and the larger community of the college support one another within and outside the classroom as we seek to become fully human and fully free, thriving in the light of Truth. We hope you will consider what we offer and join us on the journey.

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