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Dean of the University of Notre Dame Graduate School, Dr. La
Dean of the University of Notre Dame Graduate School, Dr. Laura Carlson, presents the Shaheen Award in Humanities to Thomas Aquinas College tutor Dr. Joshua Noble (Photo by Peter Ringenberg/University of Notre Dame)

At its commencement ceremonies this past weekend, the University of Notre Dame honored a member of the Thomas Aquinas College teaching faculty, Dr. Joshua Noble.

A 2010 graduate of the College, Dr. Noble earned a master’s degree in early Christian Studies at Notre Dame in 2012. He then stayed on to pursue a doctorate in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity, which he completed, save for the dissertation, in 2017. He became a tutor at the College last fall, and in April he returned to South Bend to successfully defend his dissertation, “Common Property, the Golden Age, and Empire in Acts 2:42–47 and 4:32–35.”

Over the weekend Dr. Noble was at Notre Dame once more, where he formally received his doctoral degree as well as the University’s Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate School Award, which recognizes the top graduate students in engineering, the humanities, social sciences, and science. “A specialist of Christianity and Judaism in antiquity and gifted linguist,” Notre Dame News reports, Dr. Noble “is recognized for his exceptional scholarship, which argues for the reliance of the Acts of the Apostles on the Greco-Roman Golden Age myth.”

“My dissertation explores the symbolism of the practice of common property in light of Virgil’s pronouncement of a returning Golden Age under Augustus,” says Dr. Noble, who will soon enter his second year as tutor at the College. “I’m quite happy with the dissertation, but I’m even happier to be done with it and able to concentrate fully on teaching!”