Incola: How to Till the Community and Reap Culture

Peter Kwasniewski (pronounced, at least in America, as Quash-NEV-ski), born in Chicago in 1971, spent his youth in New Jersey, where attendance at an all-boys Catholic high school brought him an exceptional training in humanities and poor to non-existent religious instruction.​

He went off to Georgetown University for a single year, after which he made one of the best moves of his life by starting over again at Thomas Aquinas College in California, from which he received a B.A. in Liberal Arts in 1994. Not having had his fill of Washington, D.C., he earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America, whose giant statue of Pope Leo XIII in McMahon Hall was a beneficent presence throughout.

After teaching philosophy and theology at the International Theological Institute in Austria and music for the Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austrian Program (1998–2006), he joined the founding team of Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming, where he served as the first Director of Admissions and Assistant Academic Dean, directed the Choir and Schola, and taught, over time, all of the theology courses and most of the philosophy and fine arts courses (2006–2018). Kwasniewski has also worked with The Aquinas Institute that, in collaboration with Emmaus Academic, is publishing a bilingual Opera Omnia of the Angelic Doctor in some sixty volumes. He is a Fellow of the Albertus Magnus Center for Scholastic Studies and a Senior Fellow of the St. Paul Center in Steubenville.

He left Wyoming Catholic College in the summer of 2018 to pursue a career as an author, speaker, editor, and publisher, with the intention of dedicating his life to the articulation and defense of Catholic Tradition in all its dimensions. As part of this endeavor, he founded Os Justi Press, which publishes both reprints of old classics and new works of high intellectual merit.

Over the past decades, Kwasniewski has published over a thousand articles, both academic and popular, on sacramental and liturgical theology, the aesthetics of music, Thomistic thought, and the social doctrine of the Church. He has written or edited over twenty books and his work has been translated into at least twenty languages. Dr. Kwasniewski is also a composer whose sacred choral music has been performed around the world.

Dr. Holmes’ earliest religious memories are of a little Presbyterian Church in Lonoke, Arkansas. He didn’t know it, but his family was on a trek from church to church that would end in the Catholic Church. As a teenager, when he awoke to the reality of God and grace and his own desperate need of both, he absorbed his father’s love of Scripture. When he wasn’t practicing piano or rehearsing magic tricks, he pored over the Bible, scribbling endless notes in his paperback RSV. After earning a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Thomas Aquinas College, where he absorbed Catholic culture and met his wife, he set out to earn a doctoral degree in biblical studies. He lived for two years in a medieval Carthusian monastery in Austria, and then for seven years in a shabby apartment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then for two years in the subtropical swamps of southwest Florida before finally finding his home in Lander, Wyoming. He enjoys introducing students to the enchanted realm of Scripture and to God and grace, and his recent book, Cur Deus Verba, is available from Ignatius Press. Dr. Holmes and his wife home school their eight children.