Meet the New Tutors: Rodrigo Ribeiro

“I first came across Thomas Aquinas College through its website many years ago,” says Rodrigo Ribeiro, who joined the New England teaching faculty at the start of the academic year. “I thought about applying then to come as a student, but at that point I was halfway through law school — and in Brazil — so I ended up putting it aside.”

A few years later, Mr. Ribeiro’s life would change course. The young student had found a new fascination alongside law: philosophy.

After earning a master’s degree at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Mr. Ribeiro emigrated to Houston, Texas, to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of St. Thomas’s Center for Thomistic Studies in 2018. Searching for a roommate, he found a TAC alumnus who was also beginning his studies at the Center. The two hit it off. “The first night I had in Houston was marked by a pleasant dinner and hours of intelligent conversations with several other TAC graduates,” he recalls.

Over his years in Texas, Mr. Ribeiro befriended many more alumni from around the area. “I could not fail to be impressed with their seriousness about the life of wisdom and the Catholic faith, different as their personalities were,” he says. “I would ask what had inspired them to pursue and live such a life, and they would constantly refer to their alma mater.”

“I would ask what had inspired them to pursue and live such a life, and they would constantly refer to their alma mater.”

Fascinated, Mr. Ribeiro picked up A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education, the College’s founding and governing document, to better understand his friends’ background. “I became convinced of the wisdom and prudence put into the work done at the College,” he says. “I concluded that I would do well to model my studies after it.” Inspired, the graduate student crafted and worked through a personal reading list alongside his formal studies — and, upon submitting his dissertation this past year, applied to teach at the College.

“I wish to pursue the active-contemplative life that St. Thomas calls the most perfect life, the life Our Lord lived — the life built on abundance of contemplation, and on the sharing of that contemplation with others through teaching,” Mr. Ribeiro reflects. “From the experience I have had, I cannot think of a better place to live such a life than at TAC.”

Having served for several years as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas, Mr. Ribeiro begins this new active-contemplative life by teaching some familiar texts in the Junior Philosophy tutorial, which is dedicated exclusively to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, and the Junior Seminar. In keeping with the College’s expectation that tutors teach across all disciplines, Mr. Ribeiro will also teach the Freshman Natural Science tutorial.

For the erstwhile law student-turned-philosopher, of course, a change of intellectual pace is no shock. “That all students at the College read and discuss the same works, and that all tutors are supposed to have a certain familiarity with the different parts of the curriculum,” he says, “helps the College to have that unity of minds and hearts which seems so important to the fulfillment of its purpose.”