Fact Book - St. John'S University: Fill & Download for Free

Not for many years!For some time, just after the start of the Millennium, I was frequently travelling British Airways from London to Toronto, then Air Canada to St John, New Brunswick.Because my company paid for flexible tickets, I was regularly upgraded to Premium Economy on BA, just for the asking.The best, though, was when BA let me down badly.They’d set off nearly three hours late, arrived just as late, and left me in Toronto Pearson airport, the last flight to St John having departed long ago. No word of an apology, no compensation, not even a hotel. They couldn’t care less. I was furious*. And bedraggled. And despondent. And exhausted, because my body clock was telling me this was now about 3am.I hauled myself to the Air Canada desk, explained what had happened, and fell upon their mercy. Of course, my outbound ticket was no longer valid. I just asked them what they could do to get me to St John for my 9am meeting. I’d pay whatever was necessary.The very nice lady there took one look at me and said “No problem, just let me see.” In a few minutes, I’d been booked on a pair of red-eye flights: first to Halifax NS, then a five hour layover before the short hop to St John. No extra to pay. Well, that was a relief.“Oh, by the way,” she added, “You look like you need this. I’ve put you in First. They’ve got massage seats. I think you’ll like that.”Guess which airline got my business from then onward?(* In fact, it would be a decade and a half before I flew with British Airways again. For this one act of neglect, BA lost tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of pounds of business from me, since I also blacklisted them in any company I ran or worked in.)

I am a St. John's Santa Fe Undergraduate 1987.Unlike most St. John's students I had attended two junior colleges before St. John's, and three other colleges afterwards. I had studied diverse subjects at those other colleges - technical subjects like forestry, computer programming, and electrical engineering. While all of my other education, including my graduate degree in Business Administration, were focused on learning some economically useful subject, little of it included much need for individual thought. Most subjects were rote learning, or project based subjects to try examples of temporal knowledge - that is, knowledge that will be useful for a limited time, like learning a no longer used programming language.St. John's however, is a whole other creature. Every day, all day long, in every subject, and outside of class, is a learning action. Not only learning but absorption. The real test at the college isn't academic it is personal. How effectively are you comprehending the subject matter and in learning it, incorporating it within yourself and becoming a liberally educated, thinking, creative, virtuous person? It is the training necessary to become a 'gold' person in Plato's Republic.The coursework is hard. Hard even for the most brilliant people I knew at the college. As a not as brilliant person in my class I can attest that there were times that my comprehension was limited. At other times the aha moments rolled in and I made leaps of comprehension and felt I had attained a completely different and more profound level of being.If you love to read, and I mean read alot, and you like to question everything in substantive ways, not superficial ways, and you are prepared to be wrong most of the time and be stumped and confused most of the time, then St. John's might be for you.The coursework is comprehensive, though it is difficult to see while you are in the middle of it. The comparison is that in the other schools I felt most coursework was superficial and there was no intent to allow real discourse or challenge to the subject matter. St. John's demands you push yourself constantly to get the most out of everything there is in the material. It is an impossible task to attain, but the striving has unlimited lifetime value.On the other side there is a potentially dark aspect to the education. St. John's creates critical thinkers who are highly adept at comprehending the elements and relationships in an idea and arguement on any issue. Ctitical thinkers can also be regarded as critics. Critics are not always the nicest people to be around. Not everyone, in fact, most people, don't like to have their every whatever criticized. St. John's graduates can sometimes come across as too critical out of habit and lacking some of the social niceties that superficial and shallow conversation allow when idiocy is present. So if you also tend towards being a critic St. John's can make you a superstar in that regard. For others it is simply an intellectual skill and tool.The books themselves are the real teachers and the challenge to the student. There's a like I'll paraphrase in the movie Good Will Hunting about going to the library and cheaply acquiring a great education by just reading the material one would find at St. John's. What's missing from the intended insult by the movie protagonist is that discourse is a material component to learning. Reading the great books by themselves will get you a ways along the path of wisdom and knowledge. Interacting with other people who picked up on different nuances and trains of thought will get you there much more effectively.One more thing, as great as I think St. John's is at what it does, there is a lot it doesn't do, like prepare you for the workforce or any job. The professional world is very different and it can be hard for people to transition from one to the other. It also isn't the only college to use the great books, I'm thinking Stanford's core curriculum and other similar programs, or the New School. There are also ordinary public colleges where you can put together a course set that covers the same material, sometimes even with some substantial discourse. But it is fairly unique in the world and excels at what it does with the Great Books Program.And other St. John's Graduates will disagree with me....just part of what we do.

Yes. It is one of the earliest symbols of Christianity, the Chi Rho, from the Greek letters Chi Χ and Rho Ρ, the letters of Ch-R-ist. The letters on the left and right, Α (alpha) and ω (omega) are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, from the New Testament statement of (edit: God to St. John in the Book of Revelation, not to Moses. Apologies) “I am alpha and omega [the beginning and the end]”. These are all combined into a single monogram (monogram is many letters threaded one through the other).The chi ro alone is the standard, the alpha and omega are elaborations, but still pretty standard ones. Basically, a way of saying “Christ, the beginning and end [of all]”. The Chi Rho would have been standard on the walls of many early churches, more so than the cross (in fact, before the cross became standard iconography in the first place), as well as on early Roman arms and armour.This was because the traditional revelation of the Chi Rho was to Emperor Constantine Equal-to-the-Apostles, before he became sole Emperor in East and West: as he sat sleeping, he saw the Chi Rho appear in the sky with the words “Εν τουτω νίκα” or “In Hoc Signo Vinces”, meaning “on this sign you will be victorious/conquer”. This he took as a sign to scribe the Chi Rho on the arms of his army, even before he officially converted to Christianity.