Lincoln bishop to keynote St. Thomas Classical Academy’s first gala

by Benjamin Shane Evans | July 28, 2026

St. Thomas Classical Academy will host its first ever gala, which will feature Lincoln Bishop James D. Conley as its keynote speaker.

The event will be held at The Tea Room, 713 Walnut Street, Des Moines, on Tuesday, October 20, beginning at 5:30 pm, and will feature cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, and a presentation titled “From Agnostic to Bishop: How Classical Education Saved My Soul” from Bishop Conley.

Founded in 2018, the St. Thomas Classical Academy is “a hybrid academy,” which means that it is a school that mixes face-to-face classroom learning with at-home learning provided by parents. The school meets in person twice a week at Saints John and Paul in Altoona, with homeschooling on the other three weekdays, and currently serves approximately 120 students across about 50 families, according to numbers provided by the school.

The aim is a “rigorous classical education and cultivation of an authentic Catholic culture [that allows] our students to encounter truth, goodness, and beauty and to deepen their love for Christ, his mother, and his church,” according to the academy’s vision statement.

One of the academy’s founders Dawn Ogden said that the education at St. Thomas is rooted in classical principles but also emphasized that the curriculum “lives and breathes” the Catholic faith.   

“We have the Catholic faith in our science program. We explicitly state that while studying science, we’re studying the nature of God,” she said. “It’s all integrated with theology and science and math and literature. They’re all connected, and that’s just a unique thing about our school, and that brings a lot to the community.”

Board member Joe Stopulos said the school has grown rapidly because of both the educational and community focus. Numbers provided by the academy show that the school started with 6 students in 4 families, then expanded to about 80 by fall ’20. It now serves around 120 students.

“When you are here, you are part of this community. I mean that sincerely; it’s one hundred percent Catholic,” Stopulos said. “All of our families go to Mass on Sunday. Most families are praying the rosary together regularly. Most families are going to Reconciliation once a month. Most families are going to a daily Mass least once a week. It’s an authentically Catholic community, and that is one of the great beauties of it.”

To meet the demand to be part of this “authentically Catholic community,” the academy has relied  “exclusively” on tuition and school family contributions. According to the school, the school’s “expenses exceed tuition revenue, which has prompted a focus on fundraising to support growth and serve more families.”.

“There are pros and cons to the growing pains, but we’re very blessed to have a lot of demand and to be able to serve the families we have,” he said. “Obviously, we want to be able to serve more families going forward.”

The gala serves as way to introduce St. Thomas Aquinas Classical and its mission “to reclaim Catholic culture by creating saints.”

“That is what we’re all about,” Stopulos said. “We feel like the best way to be introduced to that is to come and experience it through something like this [gala], because you are going to be able to hear from the students, and others, who have had their lives changed by our school or classical education in general.”

The gala will feature a keynote speech from Bishop Conley, whose story from agnostic to conversion to Catholicism to ordination as a priest and ascension to the Office of Bishop of the Diocese of Lincoln was heavily influenced by immersion in classical education and the Great Books. According to his biography on the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln’s website, Bishop Conley’s life was “profoundly changed by classical education.”

While participating in the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, which is a “well-known classical great books program,” his beliefs transformed from an agnosticism verging on atheism to Catholicism. This transformation was so pronounced that he entered the seminary for the Diocese of Wichita in 1980, received his philosophical formation at St. Pius X Seminary in Erlanger, Ky., as well as his theological formation at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., where he graduated with his master’s in divinity in 1985. Additionally, he earned a licentiate in moral theology from the Accademia Alfonsiana at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome in 1989.

As part of Benedictine College’s The Benedictine Dialogues, Bishop Conley said that his classical education began his path that eventually led to his current position as bishop. 

“For the first time, I was introduced to these great ideas,” he said. “It wasn’t primarily an intellectual journey. It was a journey of the heart. Because in addition to what we were reading, and they were great books, there were friendships beginning to develop among the students. They were appealing more to the imagination than the head.” 

Tickets for the event are publicly available online at $100 per person or $150 for two.

The Diocese supports school choice for parents. In addition to the academy offering a Catholic education, there are 16 diocesan schools throughout the Diocese of Des Moines that offer Catholic education for children.