Advantages over Catholic conferences:

Conferences are a lot of fun. You get a chance to meet hundreds of like-minded people, meet new friends, get back in touch with old ones. But not everything is peaches and cream. 

Consider: you must often drive for hours on a Friday afternoon, lodge at the nearest or cheapest hotel you can find, grab supper at a fast food joint and pay $100 just to walk through the conference door.

Once inside, the hard metal chairs are cold and about a basketball court away from the podium. In the next 48 hours, you will see perhaps a half-dozen big-name speakers, but you often must  choose who to listen to as they cram six to ten hours of talks into the allotted time.  Worse, each speaker talks only on his pet subject, a subject that may or may not have any obvious connection with any other speaker's subject. Now, no one can remember so many disconnected facts and topics presented in such a short time. So, you buy the conference tapes (another $50), books, knick-knacks, whatever you can find that can help you remember the weekend or explain it to others. And you drop an additional $10 or $20 when they pass the hat during the Saturday evening talk or right before Sunday Mass because the conference didn't make enough to cover their expenses.

So, what did you get for your $100 entry fee, your $50 conference tape set, your $20 donation and your hotel and travel expenses? You got eight hours of disconnected talks, hard conference chairs, lots of drive time, and the chance to sleep in strange beds and use strange bathrooms. Hmmmm.....

The Athanasian Advantage:

You get six weeks of instruction, not eight hours,
The price is the same or lower ($150),
Content is specifically designed to fit your time and learning level,
In our curriculum, each course logically follows and expands on previous courses,
Maximum class size is 15, not three thousand,
You get the kind of close attention usually reserved for only the most advanced graduate students,
No additional expenses (hotel, meal, gas, etc.),
No hard chairs (unless you have them at home and like them).

Disadvantages:

The instructor is more than a basketball court away.

Other On-Line Courses

But why take courses from the College of Athanasius? There are other people offering on-line course content, after all. Some of them are much cheaper.

True enough. Let's take a look at the more inexpensive offerings.

The Canned Courses

To begin with, the inexpensive courses offer absolutely no student interaction because there is no teacher. It is a canned course - click, click, click - in which you are expected to move through on-line resource after on-line resource alone. Reading material on-line by yourself is fun, isn't it? Click, click, click. None of it offers fresh insight in response to headline events nor does it offer personal witness to the importance of any aspect of the Faith. It has as much personality as your average dictionary.

The Athanasian Advantage:

Our canned material is a textbook, not a computer screen.
The computer screen is used only for changing content - conversations, discussions of today's headlines, suggestions on how to present this idea to that certain person tomorrow, etc.,
You get to discuss the Faith with a group of like-minded people,
The conversation is moderated by a master catechist who can supplement understanding, point you in new directions, and tie what you have learned in this course together with content from previous courses.

Disadvantages:

This kind of quality costs a bit more.

The Interactive Courses

But wait! There are offerings that do provide personal interaction with instructors. What about them?

First, compare prices. The difference is significant. Why? Well, many of the other on-line courses are associated with Catholic universities charging Ivy League prices. Unfortunately, you don't always get your money's worth. The vast majority of Catholic universities today are not exactly orthodox in their transmission of the Faith. While their curriculum may look good on paper, the actual content leaves quite a lot to be desired. Indeed, some "Catholic" universities have non-Catholic religion professors teaching about Christ, Mary, or liturgy - rather absurd.

Even when Catholics are teaching, it doesn't necessarily help. The vast majority of Catholic theology professors at Catholic universities have already refused to publicly swear that they will faithfully transmit the teachings of the Church. Isn't that nice? So, you pay top dollar for their courses and get... what? A high-brow version of The Da Vinci Code?

But there are some on-line courses with well-known and orthodox Catholic speaker. What about those?

It depends. While some Catholic speakers are famous because they know every aspect of Catholic Faith intimately, others are really just specialists who are only good at explaining a very narrow area of the Faith.

And even if you got a course with one of the well-rounded Catholic speakers, it might not help much. After all, they will simply transfer the Catholic conference style and format to your computer screen. 

What does that mean? It means little to no coherence between courses. The courses are not designed to help you grow in understanding from one talk to the next, rather, each course is custom-built around each individual instructor. The instructors don't talk much between themselves about how to build up a coherent vision of the Faith. Coursework does not build in a logical sequence, that is, the Catholic Faith does not unfold like a living flower as you take each successive course. Instead it is hurled at you brick by brick - this speaker this time, that speaker that time, most of them "Lone Ranger" specialists.

We have a different vision.

The Athanasian Advantage:

Every one of our instructors swears an oath of fidelity to the Magisterium. We transmit all and only what the Church teaches. We teach the Truth, straight up, hold the ice,
We provide a logically cohesive and comprehensive curriculum designed by experts,
We offer a wide range of course offerings designed specifically for the typical Catholic adult: parents, singles, DREs, youth ministers, etc.,
We offer among the lowest prices available for web-based interactive classes,
You need no special software to take our classes - a computer with dial-up or broadband access is sufficient.

Disadvantages:

You will meet only one famous Person in our entire curriculum.

Conclusion?

We've given you our take on things. The conclusion is yours. Try us out. See if we live up to our promises, because we do make one more promise: there's more here than meets the eye.