Classics | Latin | Catholic Studies | Philosophy | Art History Reader, writer, tea drinker 📖✍️☕️ Catholic revert ✝️ mama, quintuple major at 47.
USA
Joined July 2009
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Welcome to my little corner of the internet on X. 👋
I am a Catholic 46-year-old woman who chose to return to school in my 40s. I am a quintuple major studying Classics (with a focus in Latin), Catholic Studies, Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, Counseling and Applied Psychological Sciences, and Art Therapy. My goal is to become a Catholic trauma therapist and clinical psychologist. I plan to apply to a dual master’s program in theology and counseling and eventually hope to obtain PhDs in moral theology and clinical psychology.
You’ll generally find me reading, writing, studying, or antiquing and thrifting, and I almost always have some sort of tea in my hand.
I am an artist, small business owner, writer (mainly poetry, lyrics, and short stories), singer, herbalist, devoted Catholic, and I share about all of the above.
Just a warning: I ignore DMs, immediately block perverts, weirdos, and bots, and I don’t waste my time arguing with people who get upset on the internet
Originally posted on March 4, 2023, the day I decided to return to my Catholic faith. At the time, I had no idea what that decision would truly entail or how profoundly it would transform my life. Looking back, I find it beautiful that I was drawn to these words long before I fully understood their meaning.
Unfortunately, I did. 😢
Thankfully, I decided to return to school in my 40s, this time approaching my education with a sense of wonder, awe, and enchantment. I’m finally experiencing learning the way I wish every young person had the opportunity to.
Imagine spending twelve years in school without studying:
— Homer
— Plato
— Aristotle
— Cicero
— Augustine
— Dante
— Shakespeare
— Milton
For centuries, these authors formed an important part of Western education.
Today, many students finish school without reading a single complete work by any of them.
How can we expect people to understand their civilization if they have never read the books that helped shape it?
As a quintuple major with several additional minors and certificates, narrowing down what I want to study at the graduate level has been quite a journey.
I’ve been blessed with extraordinary professors, particularly Scott Lefor, Dr. Larry Fraher, Dr. Susan Carrese, Dr. Paul Carrese, Dr. Elaine Yoshikawa, and Erika Bachiochi, among many others. These professors have genuinely changed my life, helping me discover not only what I want to study, but why it matters so deeply to me.
Over the past two years, I’ve come to believe that without a strong philosophical foundation, psychology and counseling can fall short of addressing the deeper questions of human existence. My interests now center on normative ethics, particularly virtue ethics, philosophical anthropology, and aesthetics, with an emphasis on happiness, meaning, beauty, and human flourishing.
I hope to bring these foundations into my future work as a Catholic psychotherapist, helping people not only heal from suffering but also rediscover their dignity, cultivate virtue, find meaning, and pursue genuine happiness. I believe therapy should extend beyond alleviating psychological distress to consider the flourishing of the whole human person.
I’m deeply grateful for the universities I’ve attended, the professors who have shaped me, and the freedom to take my time with my education. Now, I just need to find the right master’s program in philosophy before continuing my graduate studies in counseling. I’m open to relocating, but an online program would be ideal.
Fingers crossed that God leads me to the right program! ❤️
Agreed.
You should read books that are:
— Older than you
— More difficult than you are used to
— Written by people you disagree with
— Outside your usual interests
— Important enough to reread
— Uncomfortable to think about
Reading should not always be easy.
Sometimes the books that require the most effort are the ones that change how you think.
If you only read things you already understand and agree with, you are not learning very much.
Wow! Very cool!
A traditional Catholic calendar and diagram of the Summa Theologica by Aquinas are my two largest projects.
My favorite thing about art is connecting with people when they give my work as gifts. See both projects in this thread, or here in my shop:
📦 owen-cyclops.myshopify.com
Good point 📖
Hilaire Belloc explains why you need to read old books:
“There is no habit more dangerous to a man's active intellectual life than that of reading only modern books. The contemporary writer is usually not yet judged by time. He writes under the pressure of fashion and opinion. But the old books have survived. They have been tested. They come to us stamped with the approval of generations. To read them is to breathe a larger air.”
Which old book are you immersed in right now?
Reminder to self to read later 📖👓
I wrote about how I think intelligence and attention hang together in perception. The paper was presented as part of the @AvalonInst Exposition, an arts and humanities conference ongoing in Berkeley, CA this weekend.
Drawing on Husserl, Illich, Hugh of St. Victor, and others, I’m continuing my exploration of intellegere as a mode of attentive choosing within perception organized by our aims and values. AI is the obvious backdrop to this discussion, and I wanted to lay out these claims so that we might look at what intelligence actually is and entails.
I read Husserl in the context of more contemporary debates in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind (e.g., the Dreyfus-McDowell debate), and I draw on Alva Noë’s account of the concept as a skill of perception to advance a specific understanding of how things come to presence for us in perception.
From there, I look at Hugh’s and Illich’s work on contemplative medieval reading practices, with the implication that perception is itself a kind of practiced and interpretive reading, one that at times needs to be guarded. The paper closes with some reflections from the Republic.
Come for the epochē, stay for the prosochē. Link to follow.
Wow, it’s been a surreal day! I just found out that I’ve been accepted into an undergraduate research position at ASU! I’ll be working with local museums and historical archives, gaining hands-on experience with museum collections, historical artifacts, and research. I’m beyond excited for this opportunity and can’t wait to get started! 🧐
How exciting is it when a professor specializing in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of happiness. whose doctoral research explored shame and self-transformation, agrees to an honors contract with you? These subjects are at the heart of my academic interests. I’m thrilled!
Lisbeth Siren retweeted
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
We were concerned that the SAT has become a less reliable measure of student preparedness for a rigorous college curriculum.
So, we commissioned a study from Johns Hopkins University. What does this study tell us about the state of higher education?
The results are shocking. thaq.co/4iLThZ0
I recently changed my Counseling and Applied Psychological Science degree to an Interdisciplinary Studies degree with concentrations in Counseling and Applied Psychological Science and Neuroscience. I just signed up for my first neuroscience class, and I don’t think I could possibly be more excited! I’ve been fascinated by the human brain since I took my first psychology class in 2005, and I’m so excited to embark on this new path.
My dream would be to study at a pontifical university in Rome, where I could explore mysticism and its intersection with neuroscience and psychology. As someone who has experienced several mystical experiences, I can’t help but wonder how many people have been told by secular psychiatrists or psychotherapists that they are mentally ill, that they need medication, or, even worse, that they need to be hospitalized, when what they experienced may have been genuinely mystical.
I want to explore these experiences through theological, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives to better understand how we can distinguish mystical experiences from psychological or neurological phenomena. I recognize that there is an element of mystery in all of this. God does not reveal everything to us, and science may never be able to explain certain experiences fully. I also recognize that genuine mental illness exists and that careful discernment is essential.
But I know that my own mystical experiences were real experiences, and I want to understand them more deeply. Whether science can fully explain such experiences or not, I believe they deserve to be taken seriously and studied with both intellectual rigor and an openness to the possibility of the divine.
What a beautiful blessing to the world: instagram.com/p/Dexgt7tmU60/…
Anyone else absolutely love studying ancient creation myths, mythology, and religious traditions from different civilizations and comparing and contrasting them with Catholicism? Because I’m obsessed!
What fascinates me most isn’t necessarily the similarities, but the profound differences. From ancient Babylonian creation narratives to Greek mythology, I find it fascinating to examine how different civilizations understood the divine, the origins of humanity, morality, and our relationship with the gods.
The anthropomorphic gods, the different hierarchies of divine beings, the relationship between gods and mortals, and then the radically different Christian understanding of one eternal, transcendent God who exists beyond creation, yet enters human history through the Incarnation. And unlike the divine ancestry reserved for certain heroes in mythology, Christianity teaches that all humanity is invited to participate in God’s divine life through grace.
The more I study these ancient traditions alongside Catholic theology, the more extraordinary I find the Catholic understanding of God and the human person. I could spend hours exploring these differences, and every new discovery makes me fall even more deeply in love with my Catholic faith.