The new San Damiano College for the Trades in Springfield, Illinois, expected to open in fall of 2025, is aimed at integrating Catholic liberal arts education with practical training in a trade. Kent J. Lasnoski, formerly an associate professor of theology at Wyoming Catholic College, is working with Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield on founding the school. Lasnoski spoke with OSV News’ Charlie Camosy recently about the vision for the school and the dignity of work in the Catholic tradition.
Charlie Camosy: Tell us a bit about your journey as a moral theologian before landing in your new place.
Kent J. Lasnoski: My wife and I have always felt the mission of our marriage is to be a part of the renewal of the practice and theology of Catholic marriage and family life. My original research focus and first book as a moral theologian studied the way spouses could live poverty, chastity and obedience. After years working in marriage preparation and enrichment, we wrote “Thirty Days with the Married Saints,” a devotional for engaged and married couples.
At the same time, my local bishop in 2015 nudged me into medical ethics. I am currently co-editing and contributing to a volume on embryo adoption. Along the way I was raising children and became assistant dean for students at Wyoming Catholic College, so my path as a moral theologian has also shifted into thinking about how to teach the good life, how to form moral character, from little children up through undergraduates.
Camosy: And now you find yourself at the new San Damiano College for the Trades. What is the San Damiano College for the Trades?
Lasnoski: This is a school that answers Christ’s command to St. Francis of Assisi, “Rebuild my church,” in every sense: material, cultural, intellectual, liturgical, spiritual. At the center is our goal of helping students recover the dignity of work and the ability to integrate work into the whole of a life aimed at holiness and the common good. In a three-year program, students learn methods of discernment, go on pilgrimages and share in the liturgical life of the Norbertine Chaplains, learn the basics of multiple trades and enter an apprenticeship in one trade, earn an associate degree in the great books, and develop a Catholic community life.
Camosy: What will you be doing at this new school? How do you understand this move in the context of your calling as a moral theologian?
Lasnoski: I work under the board of directors as the founding president of the college. At this point, I am the college’s only employee, so I guess that means I’m doing everything that the board of directors can’t do on its own. My immediate task is to complete the application for permission to operate as a college in the state of Illinois.
Second to that is seeking benefactors and getting the word out there about this school as a major change agent with its novel model of higher education.
My involvement in the project has providentially and organically developed out of my own shifting focus as a moral theologian. During my nine years at Wyoming Catholic College, I turned my mind increasingly toward educational theory and moral, spiritual formation in the line of Newman (“Idea of a University”), Joseph Pieper (“Leisure: the Basis of Culture”) and John Senior (“Restoration of Christian Culture”).
At the same time, I was learning how to teach outside my degree area in the humanities and trivium, and spending time with adult learners and high schoolers in different educational settings around the great books model. I also began learning more about the burgeoning Catholic trade school movement as an answer to some of the crises in higher education.
Camosy: Obviously, much of Catholic higher education in the United States is going through some difficult times and, in many cases, trying to rethink itself in light of our challenges. Do you think your move here portends a larger shift that could happen more broadly in Catholic higher education? In Catholic theology?
Lasnoski: Both a financial shift and a pedagogical shift need to take place. Small, tuition-reliant Catholic colleges increasingly struggle in the face of endowment-heavy universities that will simply offer tuition discount-rates down to $0 for students under most income-thresholds. Smaller Catholic colleges need a new funding model to avoid tuition inflation and crippling student debt.
San Damiano is working out a pay-as-you-earn model for the total cost of attendance with no discount rate and no need for federal loans, grants or debt. At the same time, we’re seeing a pedagogical shift toward an appreciation for the true liberal arts, an education that broadens rather than narrows. San Damiano College combines a moral, spiritual and intellectual formation in the virtues that make for the good life, understood in its Catholic entirety (liberal education), while students simultaneously learn the skills that make for economic and cultural productivity as well.
Over my brief 13 years in the classroom and with colleagues in the scholarly world, two trends have emerged. First, Catholic moral theology is becoming more contextual. Second, it has become clear that it is not enough to teach about moral theology. Theology, and moral theology in particular, cannot take place apart from conversion and discipleship.
We study principally to fall in love with the One who has done everything to show his love for us! In the context of San Damiano College and its focus on work, we’re hoping people learn and live a theology of work inspired by the thought of St. John Paul II and Joseph Pieper. St. John Paul II teaches us that the value of work comes essentially from the fact that a human, one made in the image of God, is the one doing the work. In working, man imitates the generosity and creativity of the Father. Joseph Pieper teaches us that man works not principally for productivity, but for the sake of leisure, the highest form of which is worship.
Charlie Camosy is professor of medical humanities at the Creighton School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, and moral theology fellow at St. Joseph Seminary in New York.
