An athenaeum is how a college stops talking to itself and welcomes the community into the intellectual conversation. The first athenaeum was a hall Hadrian raised to Minerva, where poets read and orators contended — and the Church, in her long habit of claiming what is good wherever she finds it, baptized the institution and carried it into the Christian centuries, until nearly every serious American town possessed one: a room in which a community kept its books, heard its music, and argued about its highest things. The Ohio Valley has lost them all. What remains, from Wheeling to Weirton to Steubenville, is a landscape of shuttered halls and emptied avenues, where a people who once built cathedrals of industry now have nowhere to gather but the parking lot and the screen.

We mean to restore one.

The temple’s theater will seat five hundred. That number is not arbitrary: it is the size at which an orchestra and a paying audience can occupy the same room, and at which a lecturer, a string quartet, or a chorus needs no amplification to be heard — the room itself does the work, as rooms once did. Restored, it will carry symphonies and sacred choral programs, chamber recitals and polyphony, a standing public lecture series in philosophy, theology, history, and literature, literary festivals with the main stage here and the arguments spilling into the rooms beyond, film, commencements, and the ordinary civic ceremonies a town needs a room for. It will be open to the region’s schools, choirs, and civic groups at rates that let them actually use it. It is not a college auditorium that occasionally admits the public. It is a public hall that the College of St. Joseph the Worker welcomes the public into. 

“A city that cannot gather cannot recover,” says Jacob Imam, president of the college. “Steubenville needs a room where people can sit down together — for a symphony, a lecture, a commencement. We will now offer one.”

Beneath the same roof, two more rooms complete the work. A shrine will hold first-class relics and a replica of the Shroud of Turin, open to the public and to pilgrims — the building’s governing purpose made plain, a space long closed to the town reopened and given back to God. And Clement’s Cafe will be downtown Steubenville’s first high-end restaurant: because a concert hall without a table nearby empties the moment the last note ends, and because a downtown with no reason to stay after six o’clock is not yet a downtown. Contemplation, worship, and a good dinner have kept company for a very long time. We see no reason to separate them now.

Our students are formed in the conviction that the head must not be severed from the hands, and that the temporal order is not merely to be served but sanctified. An athenaeum is how the the good’s of the Ivory Tower overflow upon Main Street. The oldest Christian instinct, contemplata aliis tradere, to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation, is now given a roof, a stage, five hundred seats, and thrown open to the whole Ohio valley.

“Our students will restore this building with their own hands,” Imam says. “That is not a fundraising line; that is the curriculum.”