You're listening to St. Joseph, a four-part series on the Foster of Jesus Christ.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

I am Taylor Kemp, the Form Platform Manager, and this is Dr. Ben Acres, the executive director of

Form. We are in part three of four of St. Joseph. In the first episode, we looked at the Old

Testament Joseph and the New Testament Joseph. In the second episode, we looked at him under the

title of Guardian of the Redeemer. Today we are looking at him as patron of the Universal Church. And then the last episode will be St. Joseph as patron of the Redeemer. Today we are looking at him as patron of the Universal Church,

and then the last episode will be St. Joseph as patron of the domestic church.

But I wanted to start actually just with a little bit of an experience I had this week

with some friends. We were running a Bible study out of our house with some friends and I had some people come up and they were like,

this is so great. I love learning all about this, but they worked full-time jobs and they were just like,

oh, I could never learn all of this. They wanted to go to the graduate school because they knew that that's where I went and we were having all these great conversations.

They're like, I would love to learn all this, but I don't have the time.

I don't have the money to go to a graduate school for theology.

And I was like, oh, that's perfect because we have this thing called short courses.

And I was telling them all about short courses and that it's really supposed to be this bridge

between people who really want to dive into their faith, but yet they're just not able to go

to the graduate school. And so I was talking about it, they were all excited, but I thought this would just be a good chance for you to say a couple words about short courses.

Sure, yeah. Short courses are a new initiative of the Augustine Institute, and we take the professors from the graduate school, so you get the high quality instruction, and we've taken the classes that sometimes the classes and subjects that we

talk about for 40 hours in a semester and you know picked the highlight reel if you will of going

through a particular subject so we have a it's a nine course uh core class nine courses that are the

core part of this you get a theology certificate of theology in completion of those, but it's three to six half hour, sorry, three to three hours, so

six half hour sessions of a particular topic that the teacher will be sit in the classroom

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