Ph.D. in Theology

• Incoming classes to AMU's faithfully Catholic and intellectually challenging Ph.D. program are capped at four doctoral students per year to ensure individualized attention and mentoring throughout each student's time here.
• Our Ph.D. students study under Ave Maria's accomplished faculty, almost all of whom hold terminal degrees and have prestigious records of publication.
• All of our theology faculty receive the canonical mandatum when they are hired.
• Doctoral students at Ave Maria University take part in weekly colloquia on the ancients and the moderns, focusing on the interplay between philosophical and theological inquiry, Christian and pre-Christian.
• Over 90% of our doctoral graduates are teaching theology at the college, university, or seminary level.
• Potential careers for graduates from AMU's Ph.D. program in Catholic Theology include being a Director of Religious Education, a Diocesan Leader, a Theology Professor, and Religious Life
• Ave Maria University boasts a world-class theological and philosophical library.
• Ave Maria University is a recognized Newman Guide school and is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges to award baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral degrees. (Contact the Commission on Colleges at 1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, Georgia 30033-4097 or call 404-679-4500 for questions about the accreditation of Ave Maria University).

Sedes Sapientiae, ora pro nobis!

Thank you for visiting Ave Maria University’s website in order to learn more about our Ph.D. in Catholic Theology. AMU is committed to the renewal and deepening of genuinely Catholic spiritual, intellectual, and cultural life. To enter our graduate theological programs is to embark on an exacting and exciting venture to deepen both one’s contemplative union with the Triune God and one’s understanding of the great truths of the Catholic faith.

To study theology challenges us to open our minds and hearts to Jesus Christ, the one Teacher who illumines everything by his very being as the Word of the Father in the Holy Spirit. To study Catholic theology is to realize that the Word Incarnate and the Holy Spirit inspired Sacred Scripture and continue to guide the Magisterium of the Church, whose Tradition directs us as we reach up to the great minds and hearts of the many saints and scholars who over the millennia have contributed to the quest for genuine holiness, wisdom, science, scholarship, and art.

If you decide to join our doctoral program, it is their lives and writings that you will study. Fidelity to Catholic truth demands more—not less—commitment to deepening and broadening one’s intelligence to appreciate the unity of theological and philosophical wisdom, too often forgotten in the many specializations and fragmentations of contemporary academic culture. Our program emphasizes a contemplative pattern of study that initiates students into the great tradition of speculative wisdom, with its unifying theoretical vision of the whole of God’s creative and redemptive presence.

Dr. Dauphinais