Welcome to The Littlemore Institute

When he was still the Anglican vicar of St. Mary's Church in Oxford, St. John Henry Newman began to transform a quiet outlying part of his parish by holding public lectures for the residents, living a semi-monastic life, and making rooms available for retreating Oxford students to study and pray. This retreat was called Littlemore. It was a refuge for a slower and deeper form of study, accompanied by prayer, for both formal students and working adults, where spiritual formation took its place alongside intellectual formation.

In 2022, we as a culture find ourselves in desperate need of our own Littlemore. In the wake of two years of school closures, distance learning, lowered standards, and intermittent attendance at social gatherings and even church, the growth of many, children and adults alike, has been severely slowed or altogether stunted. We need to address these wants seriously and quickly. Our answer here at the Fellowship of St Columbanus is our new initiative: The Littlemore Institute.

The Littlemore Institute is the work of a few scholars and friends to make a Classical, Catholic education accessible to all. We will be cultivating a variety of programs over the next several years to reach current primary and secondary school students with tutoring and supplemental education in the Liberal Arts, and their families with homeschooling aids; we will also reach college students with advanced seminars in the Liberal Arts, and personal formation through mentorship and prayer; and finally, we will reach lifelong learners through public lectures and seminars on a variety of subjects, both classical and contemporary.

Beginning this fall we will begin these works:

• Public lectures and seminars. These are particularly aimed at "lifelong learners," adults, seniors, and families who are interested in furthering their education and personal formation, but all are welcome. Planned subjects include a multiple-part series on The Enchanted World: How to Read Like an Inkling, and a stand alone lecture entitled "The Shape of Catholic Higher Education: St. John Henry Newman and The Idea of a University."

• Private Tutoring. Students of all ages can receive private tutoring in a variety of subjects within the Classical Liberal Arts through our participating scholars. Generous scholarships are available for those with financial need.

• Theology Discussion Group. Aimed at university undergraduates who want to engage more deeply in a seminar-like setting, we will meet weekly with highly qualified theology instructors over coffee to discuss theological classics, with a special focus on the English Catholic tradition.

• A Homeschool Resource Library. This resource is still in development, but we will begin acquiring classics, textbooks, and worksheets which will be available to homeschooling families and families interested in homeschooling.

From this foundation we want to build a more ambitious edifice, consisting of:

• College-level Courses in the Liberal Arts. Whether for university students home for the summer, for returning adults, or as a supplemental evening class, we will offer a thoroughly Catholic, thoroughly Classical course of study that can help students of all disciplines and subjects to be enriched by the great Tradition of literature, philosophy, theology, music, and mathematics. The centerpiece will be an eight-semester course called Readings in the Catholic Tradition: From the Ancient Near East to the Contemporary World, which will guide students through the whole history of Christianity through close readings of selected key texts.

• A Homeschool Resource Center. The resource center will not only provide a library especially designed for homeschool needs, but also classroom and meeting spaces for co-ops, highly qualified and orthodox tutors.

• A Residential Honors Program. College students from colleges and universities around the Greater Cincinnati area would live on the campus, pray together daily from the Liturgy of the Hours according to the Rule of St. Benedict, attend the Readings in the Catholic Tradition seminar, and tutor less advanced students.

• A Wider Range of Public Lectures. We want to expand the range of seminars and lectures available to the public from theology and literature to art, history, astronomy, math, statistics, and current events.

Our ultimate goal is to found a teaching community which will offer a full range of Liberal Arts courses at the college level, for residential students taught by a residential faculty, who pray the Hours of Prayer together daily, and work together both in education and in the manual work of agriculture and craftsmanship.

We want to enrich the whole community, to cultivate a deeper wisdom, rooted in ancient tradition and made available to the whole public. It will be an education which is unapologetically orthodox and Catholic, grown from the soil of the Faith once delivered. All of our programs will begin with prayer and end with a commission to life transformed by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ our Lord. Amen.

For more information about lectures and seminars that we will be offering this fall, please contact us at fellowshipofstcolumbanus@gmail.com . We will also be updating this Google Calendar as we add events. Live lectures are planned for the Greater Cincinnati area, and our instructors located elsewhere are planning digital events.