The Augustine Institute is a response to St. John Paul II’s call to Catholic universities to offer “a living institutional witness to Christ and his message” and to serve the Church’s mission of evangelization (Ex corde Ecclesiae, #49).
At the heart of our academic community is our resident faculty, fifteen theologians, philosophers, and Biblical scholars sharing a common life of study and teaching on our campus in Missouri. They are dedicated to a common venture of faith: the work of making the wisdom of Christ crucified better known and loved (cf. 1 Cor. 2:2). Together with the staff of the Graduate School of Theology and our colleagues in the broader Augustine Institute, the faculty have the privilege of attending Holy Mass offered daily at noon in the Chapel of St. Augustine and participating in the Institute’s joyous culture of celebrating and communicating the Catholic faith.
The Augustine Institute began as a residential, on-campus graduate program, and today our forty full-time on-campus students are an essential part of our community. They come to St. Louis for two years of study, enriched by the liturgical life and academic activities of the Institute and benefitting from the opportunities for internships and mentorship from other Catholic institutions.
Since 2008, the Augustine Institute has been offering its degrees by distance education, and today our more than four hundred online students hail from over forty states and more than a dozen foreign countries. They serve the Church in nearly every imaginable way and setting, in parishes, schools, colleges and universities, dioceses, and apostolates, as laity, permanent deacons, consecrated men and women, and priests. They enjoy lively interaction with our faculty, who invest deeply in their education - teaching their classes, grading their work, conversing with them on videoconferences, and welcoming them to campus for week-long and weekend intensive classes – because they admire and share their commitment to the Church’s work of evangelization and catechesis.
Our academic community also includes our alumni, soon to number over 1,000 Master of Arts graduates. They are leaders in the work of evangelization and catechesis, serving Christ’s people with distinction from Singapore to South Dakota and points in between. Many of our alumni keep their theological tools sharp by auditing classes through the Graduate School’s latest initiative, a not-for-credit extension we call our Open Classroom. Others are making use of the tools for evangelization provided by the Institute’s FORMED.org platform and Word of Life curriculum.
We invite you to join us in the pursuit of the knowledge Christ, the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24).
