So, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Aquinas walk into a bar . . .

I really enjoyed this piece, at First Things, by Fr. J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., called "Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Aquinas:  An Imagined Encounter".  A bit:

. . . Thomas Aquinas was equally committed to university life. To be sure, when Thomas taught at the University of Paris, universities were themselves something of a novelty. The University of Paris was more than 500 years old when Jefferson established this great university in Charlottesville. But, Thomas Aquinas, like Thomas Jefferson, was not content merely to gain knowledge, he wished to share it and dedicated himself to a life of teaching as well as learning.

The desire to share knowledge, and not just to acquire it, exhibits not only a conviction shared by our two Thomases, but a shared virtue. Each understood, albeit in very different ways, that his prodigious gifts were not solely at his own disposal but were intended by their very nature to be shared.

Aquinas would have located that desire to share his knowledge in human nature, which was, in turn, rooted in the very essence of the Trinitarian God he worshipped. Jefferson likewise would have recognized the desire to share his knowledge in human nature, and would have seen that nature as rooted in a less personal God, but in a God who created the universe nonetheless. . . .