Born in Wonder: A Humanities Program Taught Us How to Change the World Through Literature

I was privileged to be part of the IHP, though well after its heyday, and to call the "cowboy", John Senior, my friend. I have fond memories of the program.

From Crisis

By Walker Larson

Through this program, the professors (a former WWII pilot, a cowboy, and an army veteran) transformed students by placing them in contact with authentic Christian ideas, texts, and culture.

Something miraculous occurred during the 1970s at a university campus on the plains of Kansas. Scores of young students turned away from the heathenism they’d been raised in and embraced Catholicism. Many even became monks, nuns, or priests; a few were eventually consecrated bishops. Countless others became devout teachers, parents, and writers. 

What precipitated this unlikely Christian renaissance at a secular university during a decade when millions were leaving the Catholic Church, Critical Theory was poisoning higher education, and immorality was sweeping the culture like a plague of locusts? How did these hippies turn into religious contemplatives? The answer lies in a humble humanities course, the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (IHP), led by three literature professors: John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Franklyn Nelick. 

Through this program, the professors (a former WWII pilot, a cowboy, and an army veteran) transformed students by placing them in contact with authentic Christian ideas, texts, and culture. The students’ minds were awakened to the reality of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The IHP, located at Kansas University, surged to unexpected success and popularity during the 1970s, changing hundreds if not thousands of lives. This set the program and its authors on a collision course with the university authorities and initiated a desperate fight to keep the program from “death by administration” due to accusations of proselytism and, in the end, the institution’s hatred for the program’s adherence to objective truth. A deeply human story of the struggle for the truth, the adventure of the IHP stands out from 20th-century pedagogical history like a flaming candle in the midst of the darkness of the age. There is much we can discover in its light that will aid us in the fight that continues in our own day.

The story of the IHP contains human interest and drama, a groundbreaking pedagogical model usable by contemporary educators, and a profound philosophical message that the world desperately needs to hear. I am convinced that the professors of the IHP discovered a key to restoring modern man to his senses, rebuilding an acknowledgment of objective reality (the lack of which is rotting our civilization), and preparing the way for the fruitful penetration of grace. 

What was this key? The professors discovered, as a prelude to restoring philosophical realism, the need to restore the senses, emotions, and imagination of students through wonder, “the reverent fear that beauty strikes in us,” in the words of Dr. Senior. A former student of the program, Bishop James Conley, explained in an interview with Catholic News Agency: 

The professors saw that the modern students who came to the university might be very bright academically, but their memories and imaginations were so affected by the modern world. They were sort of bankrupt when it came to the imagination. 

With corrupted imaginations and emotions, their minds were not even awake to truth. Thus, the professors gently led the students back to an emotional and imaginative encounter with first things, culminating in wonder. 
Wonder, as Aristotle teaches, is the beginning of philosophy, the beginning of loving the truth. It is precisely a re-enchantment with truth—a falling in love with what is—that this weary world stands in need of. The motto of the program sums up the essence of the professors’ epiphany as well as the spiritual childhood at its heart: “Nascantur in Admiratione,” which means, “let them be born in wonder.” 

The professors realized that modern man must return to first things and learn to wonder at them again in order to restore healthy education, philosophy, and, ultimately, civilization. As Dr. Senior wrote in The Restoration of Christian Culture, “No serious restitution of society can occur without a return to first principles, yes, but before principles we must return to the ordinary reality which feeds the first principles.”

The professors accomplished this “birth in wonder” by exposing the students in a simple, heartfelt, and non-academic manner to the great texts of Western civilization, alongside direct encounters with the mystery of reality through stargazing, dancing, singing, festivals, and studying abroad. All this aimed to capture not just the students’ minds but their hearts as well. 

Most lectures consisted of students listening to the three professors talk in an unstructured manner, a kind of improvised symphony of ideas. The three teachers passed the points of the conversation among themselves, now holding up a truth to let the light shine through it, now leaping to a related anecdote to illustrate, now showing the connection between the text and the students’ own experience, their words glancing and shimmering, sparking with laughter and life, showing the students in real time the delight of discovering reality. And all of it was fueled by friendship and the shared love of truth.

Do these half-remembered conversations of three beloved teachers hold a key to victory in the intellectual and educational battles of our own day? I think the answer is yes. The conservative world in general and Catholic world in particular continues to reap a rich harvest from the work of these three unassuming, brilliant, eccentric, and holy men. 

The more I investigate this story, the more I see its hidden fruits and how so many of the positive movements in American Catholicism have ties to the IHP. In the words of former president of Wyoming Catholic College Kevin Roberts, “Without John Senior and the movements he spawned, there would, in fact, be little hope for the future.”[1] Wyoming Catholic itself was inspired by the work of the IHP, along with many other schools and colleges throughout the country. New generations are discovering the work of the IHP and carrying its torch forward. The IHP’s effects, like the ripples from a stone dropped in a lake, continue to wash through the decades and lap up on the shores of eternity itself.

The IHP’s mission, vision, and legacy has very practical applications for our current crisis as well. With the shuttering of Catholic schools and colleges, the destruction of authentic liberal education worldwide, and moral and doctrinal relativism invading even the Church, we need the story of the IHP now more than ever. We need to place ourselves as pupils before these great teachers and let them show us—and the world—not only how to believe in reality again but how to love it again. The IHP showed the way.

Alas, I am too young to have attended the IHP, though its memory seems to haunt me as if I had. My experiences as an undergrad and graduate student at a secular university followed by my years as a teacher at a classical academy sent me on a journey for a better way of teaching and learning—and, thus, an in-depth examination of the IHP. And though I missed the program by forty years or so, I’ve discovered that the spirit of the program and the men who made it lives on. You catch a glimpse of it just by talking to their students, older men and women now, who remember every detail, whose youth seems to flood through them again when they speak of their experiences in the program. 

As a darkness falls across our world in this 21st century after Christ, the image of the three professors, seated together, students ringed around them enthralled, imprints itself upon my mind as a quiet glow, or a familiar poem—warm, luminous, and overflowing the bounds of time. Senior’s gaze is fixed on the book before him, a contemplative smile on his lips. Quinn’s finger is raised, his eyes bright; he is about to speak, a truth blooming on his tongue, maybe some mystery that words will never be able to fully express. 

All three professors are gone now—to their eternal rest, I hope. But they left us something. Something we would be fools not to take up and take to heart, signposts in a strange land, reminders of the permanent things, like dusty old maps, directing our gaze upward to the stars the professors so loved to speak of. Their work is a reminder of that “undiscovered country” beyond the bounds of this world, and it echoes like that celestial music that radiates through the heavens (as Dante taught us in his cosmic comedy), calling us home. 

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[1] Quoted in Fr. Francis Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, dust jacket.