New Saint Andrews combines a clear and principled voice on social issues, unwavering biblical convictions, and a dedication to academic excellence, in order to create the kind of leaders our culture desperately needs. Our low student to faculty ratio creates close, dialogue-driven classes. Along with our academically rigorous, single-focus major, we deliver on our mission to make students courageous, capable, wise leaders.
Students in the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Culture study the following disciplines during their education.
Latin was the language of the western world’s growth and the language of the Reformation, which makes it an essential subject for any Christian liberal arts program. At New Saint Andrews, incoming freshmen are placed in one of seven tracks, so that—no matter what level of ability—they may progress as far in Latin as they are willing and able. Many of our students are able to read, speak, and write Latin by their second year of study. Four years of study are available, spanning Classical, Medieval, and Reformation-era Latin. Studies include the study of authors like Virgil, Ovid, Livy, and Phaedrus, and students engage with Latin poetry, the Vulgate, Augustine’s Confessions and many other texts.
While the Greek language is one of the classical languages of the West, most significantly the New Testament was written in Greek. Through Greek studies, New Saint Andrews gives students insights into our western tradition from the classical age and into the Reformation, and Greek studies enable students to conduct true scholarship and study of the New Testament in its original language. Students electing to take Greek may choose between New Testament and Classical Greek. Just as in the Latin program, students learn to read, speak, and write in Greek. This is the only undergraduate degree in the country that offers spoken and written Greek instruction. Our most successful students not only have direct access to the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, but also to the great works of antiquity written in Classical Greek, such as Homer, Plato, and Herodotus. Three years of Greek study are available, spanning Homeric, Classical, New Testament, Early Christian, and Reformation-era texts.
Students may elect to take Biblical Hebrew courses with an emphasis on exegesis and interpretation of the Old Testament. Our most successful students have direct access to the Hebrew Old Testament and are well prepared for seminary, graduate school, and a lifetime of personal study of the Scriptures in Hebrew. Three years of Hebrew study are available, spanning literature from the Old Testament to the Medieval Jewish Grammarians, who are so important for understanding Reformation-era works. Hebrew studies include texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd Temple literature, Medieval Hebrew poetry, and select Rabbinic texts.
Chaucer nowadays is usually read in modernized prose editions. But at New Saint Andrews, students interact with Chaucer and other Middle English authors in their original verse. Unlike with other languages, Middle-English students jump directly into reading original texts, such as The Canterbury Tales and various Chaucer texts, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Students develop a powerful understanding of English language, working to master pronunciation and retain Middle English vocabulary as they delve deep into the mechanics of poetry and the history of our language.
As philosophy becomes more peripheral in colleges, New Saint Andrews keeps it central in its single-focus major. Students engage philosophy as a mode of inquiry addressing the ultimate questions of life—e.g., questions of existence, knowledge, and values—and which, as such, seeks to uncover the foundational principles of any given subject matter. Thus, while the liberal arts education at New Saint Andrews College attempts to take a properly philosophical approach to all of its subjects—including the languages, history, literature, and more—students also have the particular opportunity to take philosophy courses on such topics as God, man, society and politics, religion, apologetics, economics, science, and mathematics.
At New Saint Andrews, students have the opportunity to study economic theory and economic practices. Studies include a systematic introduction to the economic laws of all human action, including such microeconomic topics as the origins and nature of money, price theory, supply and demand, capital and interest, entrepreneurship and profit, and financial markets, and such macroeconomic topics as free market capitalism, socialism, Keynesianism, economic growth, employment, the banking system, inflation, recessions, government regulation, and tax policy. Electives and directed studies in the history of economic thought and in special economic topics are offered as well.
While our college is conservative in its stance, political studies are more than partisan topics. The very nature of politics is considered: is politics the science of the political community in general or, more narrowly, is it the science of the moral use of coercion in particular? This is one of the many questions raised in our undergraduate program. Students can undertake a systematic and historical introduction to politics, reading and debating such classical works as Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, Aquinas’s On Kingship, Calvin’s “On Civil Government,” and John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Studies also cover such topics as conservatism, libertarianism, democracy, federalism and the American founding, and Constitutional law. Electives and directed studies in the history of political thought and in special political topics are offered as well. These studies equip our graduates with an incredibly deep and robust understanding, an ability to converse and persuade, as well as mature conviction when it comes to the civic sphere.
For leaders to anticipate the future, they need to understand the past. New Saint Andrews recognizes the value of knowing the story of our culture and society, and so all students are required to study the works of the West’s great historians from ancient Near Eastern authors to Karl Marx. While gaining a vision of the greater historical narrative, students also consider the contexts of the historians themselves and the philosophy of history keeping. In particular, students consider how the western tradition reflects back upon itself, analyzing how western historians tell their own story. Written assignments require library research, interaction with current historical scholarship, and original research using both written and oral sources. Courses engage classical antiquity, the rise of Christendom, and the Reformation and its aftermath.
New Saint Andrews recognizes the incredible influence of literature on culture as it often serves, in Hamlet’s words, as “a mirror held up to nature.” Students are guided through the great tradition of literature, studying the genres of epic, tragedy, the novel, and lyric poetry. Courses approach literature as concrete language, as the language of experience, as a formal art, forging connections between things, aiming to synthesize rather than analyze. Studies include the texts that have most shaped western civilization, including authors such as Homer, Shakespeare, Frost, Dostoevsky, McCarthy and more, with the opportunity to take further literature electives.
Communication is an essential part of life. It is a skill that both the workforce and the civic sphere of our society desperately need. In both oratory and writing, students at New Saint Andrews are trained to to persuade, inform, and motivate. These rhetorical skills become habits that students will employ in all their course work. Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria serve as foundation texts for rhetoric studies. Students progress through formal and informal logic, persuasive writing and its fundamental components, and rhetorical principles in oratory. Both prepared and impromptu rhetorical exercises are regular in rhetoric studies.
The liberal arts curriculum at New Saint Andrews is unique by its inclusion of mathematics. We recognize the foundational relationship between math, logic, and reason, and math’s downstream consequences on the marketplace of ideas. Students investigate the nature of mathematics and physics, observing the interplay between math, philosophy, and scientific theories. Also considered is the relationship of physics to metaphysics. Beginning with Pythagorean origins, students learn the influence of mathematics on thinkers from Plato to Leibniz. Calculus, non-Euclidean geometries and finite numbers, and the logical foundations of math can all be studied in the undergraduate program.
One of secularism’s most aggressive fronts is the field of science. At New Saint Andrews, students are immersed in a unified introduction to the life sciences. We explore the unity, diversity, and complexity of creation through readings, lectures, lab experience and field research. Students gain a broad foundation in biology while special attention is given to in the human body. Unfolding God’s creation not only gives students an appreciation of his wisdom and power, but also causes them to be conversant in current issues like origins, evolution, and human nature.
Freshman theology is a year-long introduction to essential truths of the Christian faith, concerned with cultivating a life informed and formed by a robust vision of the Creator and all creation in relation to Him. Embracing a Reformed perspective, the course focuses on those practices befitting orthodoxy and orthopraxy, including confession, prayer, and praise, all undertaken within the communion of saints, unto the glory of the Triune God and enjoyment of fellowship with Him. Senior-year theology is built upon the two foundations (principia) found in Reformed Theology: The doctrine of God and the doctrine of Scripture. The doctrine of God (principium essendi) is not only foundational to the senior-year theology colloquium, rather true knowledge and love for God is the desired end of the whole year. The doctrine of scripture (principium cognoscendi) is essential for any proper understanding of God’s self-revelation to us in his written word. The senior-year theology colloquium progresses in its study of this principium cognoscendi from a study of the phenomena of God’s written word to the important question of how to read it faithfully as Christians.
New Saint Andrews College considers it a privilege to equip students with minds capable of defending God, his authority, and his word. We recognize this as a great need of our time. By studying the philosophical underpinnings of science, mathematics, logic, and epistemology, our graduates leave confident in their own faith and in their ability to deconstruct arguments against the faith.
The liberal arts are a collection of diverse and time tested subjects which develop creative and critical thinkers. New Saint Andrews continually mines the riches of the liberal arts tradition and refines the curriculum for contemporary life and work. The studies are integrated and interdisciplinary which not only creates more robust, adaptable minds but is true everyday living.
At New Saint Andrews, an academic year is comprised of four, quarter terms. In the first year, all freshmen students take the same foundational courses. As students progress into upperclassman, they are able to take a greater number of electives and can lean into disciplines of their choice. All graduates finish by completing a senior thesis.
To view all our undergraduate courses, download the 2020-2021 academic catalog.
