My appreciation for the curriculum at DSPT has increased even more since I began doctoral studies at the Catholic University of America. Most of my classes today focus on twentieth century theologians: Congar, Rahner, von Balthasar, de Lubac, and so on. We often see these scholars as having abandoned the "scholastic" model of Thomas Aquinas. Yet I am finding that in their writings, they regularly assume that their reader is familiar with Thomistic concepts and scholastic terminology. So my study of Thomas at DSPT turns out to not only be valuable in its own right, but to be an essential preparation for the study of more recent scholars. Schools that consider Thomas to be antiquated and skip straight to the "moderns" are therefore not only omitting Thomas, but actually preventing their students from fully understanding these modern theologians as well.
DSPT also prepared me for my doctoral studies in the way its courses were run. The courses I took at DSPT always welcomed input from students, but never degenerated into "bull sessions" where all opinions were floated as "interesting" and left simply at that. I also have a new appreciation for the amount of writing that I had to do at DSPT, as I am seeing that other students in my doctoral program who were not assigned term papers in their master's program are at a disadvantage now. The Master of Arts in Theology degree that I earned at DSPT has turned out to be the ideal preparation for my current doctoral studies.
