St. John's College Alumni

It is with profound sadness that we share the news of the passing of Mr. Warren Winiarski (Class of 1952), our beloved alumnus and extraordinary donor, on Friday, June 7, 2024. Warren and his wife Barbara (Class of 1955), who preceded him in death, were integral members of the St. John's College community for more than seven decades, providing transformative financial support to the college while always remaining active members of our intellectual community.

As we all know, Warren's remarkable journey as a winemaker, most notably through his pioneering work with Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, is celebrated worldwide. His success in the wine industry is paralleled by his deep dedication to education and the liberal arts as practiced here at St. John's. The Winiarskis' philanthropic efforts, including the transformative $50 million Challenge Grant to the Freeing Minds Campaign, have significantly advanced St. John's College, our Program, and our community of learning.

In the next week, we will share more about Warren's incredible life and the lasting impact he and Barbara have made on St. John's College. We will also celebrate Warren at our upcoming board meeting. In the meantime, our thoughts and heartfelt condolences go out to their children Kasia (A84), Stephen, and Julia (SF92); their grandchildren; and all of their loved ones.

You love books so consider St. John's Year of Classics, a nine-month journey online or in-person in Annapolis, Washington DC and – for the first time – in Santa Fe – with fellow lovers of intellectual inquiry. Together they examine great works inspired by the ideals and curriculum of the St. John’s College program, based on the premise that the “books are the most important teachers.” Registration and information at https://www.sjc.edu/year-classics

Seminars will explore the theme of “Mirth, Merriment, and Mockery,” and include readings from such authors as Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Molière, Chekhov and Twain. The full reading list is here: https://www.sjc.edu/year-classics/theme-reading-list

We're excited about embarking with you on this year of Mirth, Merriment, and Mockery, starting in September!

You love books (and bookstores!) so consider St. John's college Year of Classics, a nine-month journey online or in-person in Annapolis, Washington DC and – for the first time – in Santa Fe – with fellow lovers of intellectual inquiry. Together they examine great works inspired by the ideals and curriculum of the St. John’s College program, based on the premise that the “books are the most important teachers.” Registration and information at https://www.sjc.edu/year-classics

Seminars will explore the theme of “Mirth, Merriment and Mockery,” and include readings from such authors as Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Molière, Chekhov and Twain. The full reading list is here: https://www.sjc.edu/year-classics/theme-reading-list

We're excited about embarking with you on this year of Mirth, Merriment and Mockery, starting in September!

A little stardust at St. John’s!

Registration is now open for St. John's college Year of Classics, a nine-month journey online or in-person in Annapolis, Washington DC and – for the first time – in Santa Fe – with fellow lovers of intellectual inquiry. Together they examine great works inspired by the ideals and curriculum of the St. John’s College program, based on the premise that the “books are the most important teachers.” Registration and information at https://www.sjc.edu/year-classics

Seminars will explore the theme of “Mirth, Merriment and Mockery,” and include readings from such authors as Aristophanes, Chaucer, Molière, Chekhov and Twain. The full reading list is here: https://www.sjc.edu/year-classics/theme-reading-list

We're excited about embarking with you on this year of Mirth, Merriment and Mockery, starting in September!

Watch Santa Fe graduate (SF24) Joanna Thornhill in a Latin conversation with college director Charles Bergman.

Thornhill doesn’t know which career path she intends on pursuing following her recentgraduation, but she does know she wants to continue teaching ancient languages. “Learning—especially learning about how other people communicate through time—can make you more thoughtful and open,” she says. “It makes you see the similarities and keeps us informed, and I think that is an intrinsic good.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va_eIHsguag&t=37s

Why Joanna Thornhill (SF24) Made Learning—and Teaching—Ancient Languages Her Mission It’s easy to overlook the humanity of past generations, but a long-preserved Platonic dialogue or an etched prayer to Asclepius to relieve indigestion can always remind us.

Meet Yonas Ketsela (AGI24), a pre-med major-turned philosophy PhD candidate who currently works as a registered nurse while completing his Masters Arts in Liberal Arts degree at St. John's College in Annapolis.

Scholars across millennia have turned to nature while contemplating life’s biggest questions. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Yonas Ketsela decided to pursue his own passion for philosophy—a far cry from his original pre-med track—while living in the mountains of southern Oregon as a college student.

Read more....

Graduate Institute Student Spotlight: Yonas Ketsela (AGI24) Scholars across millennia have turned to nature while contemplating life’s biggest questions. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Yonas Ketsela (AGI24) decided to pursue his own passion for philosophy

Study Abroad Opportunity This Summer for Alumni and Current Students: Johnnies in Oxford!

For the second year, The Oxford Exchange, a British nonprofit education policy and exchange organization, has designed a two-week residential course in Oxford for alumni and current students from St. John’s College. Johnnies live, learn and dine in University College, Oxford (founded in 1249) which is one of the oldest and most prestigious colleges in Oxford University.

This year, the “Johnnies in Oxford” programme features English Literature in addition to PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), and Classics. The cohort also takes a study trip to London and participates in activities such as VIP Guest Tutor Night, Shakespeare plays, punting on the River Isis, pub crawls, and more. This will allow Johnnies to further enhance their knowledge of the Great Books, whilst immersing themselves in Oxford academic and social life. “The Greats in Oxford” program will be held July 28 - August 10. More info and to register: [email protected]

To mark the introduction of St. John's Books by Johnnies, three eminent alumni from the Santa Fe campus - former college president John Agresto, novelist Salvatore Scibona, and academic author Patricia Sauthoff - featured in the NMPBS flagship "New Mexico in Focus" program discussing the value of a liberal education.

BooksbyJohnnies.com is an online bookshelf featuring a wide spectrum of creative works produced by the college's alumni and faculty.

See the PBS interviews at: https://youtu.be/dtR6pA4gKms

NMPBS' New Mexico in Focus: St John’s College Authors on the Value of a Liberal Arts Education New Mexico PBS host Gwyneth Doland sat down with three St. John's College authors for a conversation on the value of the liberal arts. Part of the New Mexico...

Save the Date for Homecoming 2024: A Return to Tradition


· Santa Fe Homecoming:
Friday, September 13-Sunday, September 15
Reading Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

·Annapolis Homecoming:
Friday, September 27-Sunday, September 29,
Reading The Bacchae by Euripides.


Save the date for St. John’s College’s Homecoming events this fall! Homecoming in 2024 is open to all alumni and brings back many of the traditions we know from you are a valued part of returning to campus.

Watch out for more details soon.

Finished with your degree, but not with the Program? Alumni can take preceptorials virtually or on campus at a discounted rate. Preceptorial topics for Summer 2024 include Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Henry James, and others.

Information at: https://www.sjc.edu/current-students/graduate-annapolis/preceptorials

For any questions, please email [email protected]

A message to our alumni from President Nora Demleitner: "The conversations and advocacy I have seen around the issue of sexual misconduct since joining the college, and especially in the past several weeks, are both heartbreaking and inspiring. It is clear our alumni care deeply about the institution and want to see positive change. In a small community such as ours, incidents of sexual misconduct can feel especially damaging. Creating a culture of belonging for our students, where everyone in the community feels safe, and trusts in the institution to take their concerns seriously, is a priority for me." Read the entire statement:

A Message to Our Alumni from President Demleitner A message to our Alumni from President Demleitner

Finished with your degree, but not with the Program? Alumni can take preceptorials virtually or on campus at a discounted rate. Preceptorial topics for Summer 2024 include Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Henry James, and others.

Information at: bit.ly/3QSfu9I


For any questions, please email [email protected]

Finished with your degree, but not with the Program? Alumni can take preceptorials virtually or on campus at a discounted rate. Preceptorial topics for Summer 2024 include Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Henry James, and others.

More https://www.sjc.edu/current-students/graduate-annapolis/preceptorials

For any questions, please email [email protected]

Annapolis Graduate Institute Preceptorials | St. John's College Preceptorials offered for the Annapolis Graduate Institute at St. John's College.

Longtime Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds Johnny Zamora. For four decades, from 1967 to 2009, Johnny (who still resides in Santa Fe) oversaw this campus's men and women in blue (and sometimes green), whose Sisyphean daily labors of relentless cleaning, repair, landscape maintenance, and event setup and takedown are the very backbone of our College's existence, and whose care and diligence have repeatedly earned our campus its ranking as one of the most beautiful in the country.

Photo from the Meem Library Archives.

Sunday's commencement in Annapolis will be live streamed here:

St. John's College Annapolis - 2024 Commencement Commencement ceremonies for the Class of 2024 will be held on the front campus at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 12.

Still a few seats left for William Shakespeare's The Henriad at Summer Classics in Santa Fe (July 15-19, 2-4pm MDT).

In these four interlocked plays, Shakespeare tells the story of the English monarchy in a crucial transformative period. Richard II, a better poet than a king, loses control over factions in his state and descends into tragedy. Henry Bolingbroke seizes the throne and then finds himself surrounded by challengers who see Henry’s actions as encouragement for their own rebellion. His son, Prince Hal, retreats into the taverns of East London where, in the company of Falstaff and against the expectations of his father and the establishment of nobles, he grows into the most glorious leader of English history. That, at least, is the superficial narrative.

The depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s characters invites ever more interesting reflections on this fascinating story. In four interlocked plays, Shakespeare tells the story of the English monarchy in a crucial transformative period. Richard II, a better poet than a king, loses control over factions in his state and descends into tragedy.

Register here: https://ow.ly/cLxJ50RASPg

As if more convincing was required, here's Dame Judi Dench on the power of Shakespeare.
https://ow.ly/YopJ50RASPb

www.linkedin.com

Did you know there was film at Summer Classics? Come spend some time with Sergio Leone’s two western epics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. Both movies rejoice in soundtracks by Ennio Moricone, widely considered to be among film's finest composers.

Tutors: Natalie Elliot and Eric Salem
2–4 p.m. MDT. July 22–26, 2024
Fee: A Fistfull of Dollars.

More information: https://ow.ly/4rom50RASnj

Is it ironic that two of the greatest films about the American West and our emerging sense of national identity were created by an Italian filmmaker who shot them in Europe? Leone’s two Western epics (also referred to as spaghetti Westerns) further developed the themes and styles of great American filmmakers like John Ford to tell the story of America’s Civil War and westward expansion through the eyes of a European sensibility—not unlike de Tocqueville’s brilliant insights into American democracy penned 130 years earlier. In addition to being two of the greatest and most ambitious films made in the tradition of the American Western, Leone’s movies are stories of greed, violence, passion, and revenge that helped raise both Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson to international stardom and feature brilliant performances by actors such as Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Woody Strode.

Summer Classics focus: July 8 - July 12
Plato’s Hippias Major and Hippias Minor
Tutors: James Carey and Frank Pagano

Take advantage of the best opportunity and place to study Plato in-depth, at St. John’s College this summer!
Join with tMr. Carey, Mr. Pagano and other curious minds to delve deeply into two of Plato’s lesser-explored works, Hippias Minor and Hippias Major.

Hippias of Elis, a well-known sophist, is Socrates’s interlocutor in two dialogues named after him. The central theme of the Hippias Major is beauty. The central theme of the Hippias Minor is falsehood. A suggestion is advanced in the latter that intentional falsehood might be better than unintentional falsehood. This suggestion is connected to Socrates’s general claim that virtue is knowledge and. vice is ignorance. That Hippias is Socrates’s sole interlocutor in a dialogue treating beauty—or nobility, as they are the same word in Greek—and his chief interlocutor in a dialogue treating falsehood raises the questions of how beauty is related to intentional distortion of truth and whether truth, considered in itself, is closer to ugliness than it is to beauty.

Seminar details and registration here: https://ow.ly/OtwU50Ru960

Can't make it to Santa Fe? Get your Summer Classics ONLINE: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Tutors: David Carl and Ron Martin Wilson
6–8 p.m. EDT / 4–6 p.m. MDT, July 1–5

Winner of both the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was reassessed about a decade later as “the best novel of the 21st century to date” by a majority of American critics.

Felt to have resembled the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde while wearing (of course) a Doctor Who costume for Halloween, Oscar Wao is the undersexed and overweight nerd at the heart of this maximalist American novel, called by one admiring critic a “deft mash-up of Dominican history, comics, sci-fi, [and] magic realism.” Both the coming-of-age story of this would-be “Dominican Tolkien” and the painful chronicle of an immigrant family’s emergence in New Jersey from the violence and beauty of the Dominican Republic in the bloody era of Trujillo, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also gorges upon and attempts to digest the history and culture of America itself, as well as those of the broader Americas.

Readers will, therefore, experience not just a mélange of Melville and Márquez but also of Star Trek, the Fantastic Four, Dungeons & Dragons, and various alternate cosmoi that the lovelorn Oscar Wao, like so many other global youth, inhabits during his “brief wondrous life.”

Details & registration for this and other online Summer Classics seminars here: https://ow.ly/Cn4t50Ru1uX

Alumni - we want to hear from you! Please complete this 5 minute survey about the Alumni & Constituent Engagement Office’s spring events, including (in Annapolis) Croquet and (in Santa Fe) Earth Day. Let us know what you think.

Please complete this short survey to share your experience:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SJCspringevents

Paying Tribute to the Campus Bookstore With Manager Melinda Rooney (A84) The beloved student hub is slated for its first major move in decades, and Rooney—while nostalgic—is excited for a fresh start.

Great news! We've added a second seminar on William Shakespeare at Summer Classics in Santa Fe (July 15-19, 2-4pm MDT). In four interlocked plays, Shakespeare tells the story of the English monarchy in a crucial transformative period. Richard II, a better poet than a king, loses control over factions in his state and descends into tragedy. Register here: https://community.stjohnscollege.edu/summer-classics/sc-registration-week-3-in-person

As if more convincing was required, here's Dame Judi Dench on the power of Shakespeare.
https://ow.ly/s3SY50RpkeC

Ned Walpin Looks Back on 24 Years at St. John’s College—and Steering the Graduate Institute Through a Global Pandemic Walpin steps down from his GI deanship role this summer, marking the end of his 14-year involvement in college administration.

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At the St. Francis Auditorium on the Santa Fe Plaza, we co-hosted an event with the New Mexico Museum of Art.
"On Looking at Nature - and Looking Away," was a lively a panel conversation on nature and art with tutors Charlie Barret, Alison Chapman, and Ron Wilson. A student, alumni and faculty group marked with a cycle from the College to the event on the Plaza.

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For this year, our program in Santa Fe went from a cleanup at the Caja del Rio to a panel at the St. Francis auditorium in downtown Santa Fe. Pictured at the EarthKeepers 360 litter cleanup at the Caja del Rio were, from left to right: EarthKeepers 360 founder Andrew Black, former governor of Jemez Pueblo (Walatowa) David Toledo, and Derrick Toledo of Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez' office, with students Grace, Irene, and Natalie.

Did you know that is the largest secular observance in the world, reaching over a billion people in more than 190 countries? We had a memorable Earth Day weekend in Santa Fe - here are some highlights: Friday night lecture by Llyd Wells, “Clima(c)tic Change: Twenty Million Hands and the Living, Wavering Globe” - he didn't pull any punches! Sunday we had a community showcase with students and alumni including Nate Downey SF91, and Melanie Kirby SF97

St. John's visited Senator Ben Ray Lujan at the U.S. Capitol, along with other New Mexico institutions of higher education, to lobby on behalf of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). Thanks to Emily Langston, Special Advisor to the President, for elevating our work as am HSI here in New Mexico.