The College of Saint Joseph the Worker
I continually meet people who believe that training students in the Catholic intellectual tradition and the skilled trades is not merely a paradox (which I grant), but a contradiction. “Some people are meant for college; others for the trades,” I often hear. But there is something profoundly anti-Christian about this seemingly harmless statement. It is a justification for the great divorce between the head and the hands—between the active and the contemplative. This is not merely a sociological problem. It is a theological one. And it is a theological problem that was alive and well in the cultural context that Christ entered into.