Our Spring 2020 Programming

Seminars

Augustine’s Confessions
9 weeks, led by Matt Hoehn

Join us for a study of Augustine’s Confessions, the gripping spiritual journey of the greatest post-biblical Christian thinker of the Church’s first thousand years.  We will walk alongside Augustine through his youthful spiritual wanderings, his insatiable quest for love and truth, his grief over death and loss, and the eventual heart-rest he discovered in the good news of the Gospel.  Augustine has been called ‘our post-modern patron saint’ and though written 1600 years ago, it is amazing how relatable Confessions is to our questions and our questing today.

Called By God: A Study on Calling, Discernment, and Vocation
7 weeks, led by Dr. Jeremy Purvis, Matt Hoehn and visiting professionals

Dr. Jeremy Purvis (UNC Associate Professor, Genetics), Joy Purvis, and Matt Hoehn are co-leading a seminar on faith, work and vocational discernment using Tim Keller and Katharine Leary Alsdorf’s book Every Good Endeavor. In addition to readings and discussion that establish a biblical framework for understanding ‘work’, the seminar features a series of guests from different vocational fields sharing with students about how the topic explored that week maps onto their life and work.

'Meat with Local Business Leaders
6 weeks, led by Dan Copeland and Benton Moss

You may be thinking about a job at a big company, a small family company, or even starting your own thing. Local businessmen from Chapel Hill, Carolina students, and recent graduates will be getting together to talk about work and how to make it fulfilling. They'll work their way through the Praxis Business Course, 'meating' six times throughout January, February, March and April. Yes, this is a 'meating' — smoked sausage, ribs, baked potatoes. So come and feed your mind, body, and spirit and experience growth in Christ through conversation about faith in the workplace.

Life and Thought of Walker Percy
Weekly, led by Bill Boyd

Recipient of the U.S. National Book of the Year Award for his debut novel The Moviegoer (1961), author Walker Percy is one of UNC’s more underappreciated alumni. A sincere Christian, Percy’s novels and essays explore in one form or another the plight of modern man and the place of faith in contemporary America. While the reading group is designed to introduce artistically or literarily inclined students to this important Christian thinker and author, all are welcome.

Major Events

Why are Americans so Afraid of Death? | January 27

Christianity in Conversation Luncheons are hosted jointly by the North Carolina Study Center and InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries.  The format is to host a faculty whose scholarship is in some way significant for Christian thought.  The goal is to leaven the intellectual life of UNC, to provide a forum for ‘the big questions’ (God, truth, meaning, the good life, etc.) that too often go unaddressed, and to serve as a sustained Christian presence within the institutional life of UNC.  The primary target audience is faculty members, graduate students, intellectually leading undergraduate students and to a lesser degree, community members.

An Evening with James KA Smith | February 20

Join us at UNC for an evening with Christian thought leader and award-winning author, James KA Smith!  Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College where he holds the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology & Worldview.  He will be sharing about his newly released and much celebrated book On the Road with Saint Augustine in which Smith is our guide, showing us how "Augustine’s timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death."

Parents Conference | February 22

Parents of current UNC students are invited to enjoy a weekend in Chapel Hill and a Saturday morning program, hosted by the North Carolina Study Center Parent’s Council, in collaboration with the staff.  This year’s conference speaker is Bill Boyd, Director of Spiritual Formation.  He will be speaking on ‘Establishing Expectations During the College Years.’

An Evening with Dr. Robert P. George and Dr. Cornel West | April 3 

Join us to hear Dr. Robert P George and Dr. Cornel West host a collegial and thought-provoking discussion about faith, friendship and dialogue across deep personal and political differences.  Cornel West is a prominent and provocative intellectual.  He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and has also recorded three spoken word albums.  Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.  The NC Study Center is serving as a cohost of this event in partnership with the UNC Program for Public Discourse in the College of Arts and Sciences.

LDOXA | April 24

Inspired by the Greek word doxa (meaning ‘glory’), our annual LDOC (Last Day of Class) celebration is a time for students to drop by the Battle House and celebrate the last day of with smoothies and lawn games.

To Read is Human

Study Center staff Bill Boyd met with with Dr. Thomas Pfau of Duke University to talk about the formative personal and cultural discipline that is “reading.” Listen to their conversation on SoundCloud or below.

Study center staff member Bill Boyd met with with Dr. Thomas Pfau of Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill to talk about the formative personal and cultural discipline that is "reading.” More at ncstudycenter.org/news

Authors and works referenced by Dr. Pfau:

• Julius Caesar - The Gallic Wars (Latin, De Bello Gallico)

• Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

• Henry Fielding

• Thomas Paine - Common Sense

• Joseph Andrews - first English novel in 1742, “a comic epic poem in prose”

• Tom Jones - bildungsroman and picaresque literature

• Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich)

• Jane Austen - Persuasion, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey

• Stendahl (Henri Beyle) - The Red & the Black (French-English tr. by Margaret Shaw)

• Gustav Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education

• Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good & Evil

• Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain

• Seamus Heaney - Opened Ground, Death of a Naturalist, North, Field Work, Station Island

• Rainer Maria Rilke - The Duino Elegies, Letters to a Young Poet

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poetry & Prose (Norton Critical Edition)

• William Wordsworth (stop after 1807)

• John Keats (start after 1817)

• J.M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace

• Vasily Grossman - Life & Fate, Everything Flows

• Czeslaw Milosz - The Captive Mind, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition

• T.S. Eliot - Poems, 1909-1925

This season is the perfect time to go to a local bookseller and buy a “shamelessly canonical” book for a friend or family member. Celebrate the Word made flesh with words made visible in print. 🙂

Interested in more?

• Leo Tolstoy Creates a List of the 50+ Books That Influenced Him Most (1891)

• The 10 Books By Leo Tolstoy You Have To Read

Books as ladders to an invigorated imagination

Dear friends,

At the study center we are reflecting on building a library of formational books. Just as importantly, we are drawing from friends to learn what books to recommend when. Reading a good book at the wrong time might be just as bad as reading a bad book at any time. And reading a sequence of good books may be far better than jumping straight into a demanding book and only finishing the first half of it.

And, if you permit me a final thought, it may be very profitable to read a bad book at the right time -- after you have the resources to sufficiently critique it, or maybe as a way to exhaust the appeal of something so nakedly awful.

So, what books have been important to you? Was there a necessary order to reading them?

We'd love your thoughts. What follows are ways of answering.

Was there a ladder of books that you followed? Maybe you began with something familiar to your parents and ended up somewhere slightly different but also helpful. The dream would be a Great Books progression, but most of us just aren't that lucky. One such ladder for me was:

• Colson's How Now Shall We Live

• Willard's Divine Conspiracy

• Lewis' Mere Christianity

• Buechner's Telling the Truth

• Newbiggin's Gospel in a Pluralistic Society

• MacIntyre's After Virtue

While increasing levels of abstraction may be unhelpful, as our powers of reasoning and pattern recognition grow there is often a movement from familiar to unfamiliar, straightforward to what once might have been risky. No need to be fancy here — just let us know what took you where.

Or, if you are like me, books have been just as important for your emotional and aesthetic maturity. What fiction or poetry invigorated your moral imagination at just the right time? You grew up as you read and confronted various vices and virtues in a number of genres. For me Prince of Tides was invaluable. So was Brothers Karamazov. So was Lord of the Rings (which was required reading for a UNC course!). For many our students, Harry Potter was tremendously evocative and always comes to mind.

Given that we are interacting with hundreds of students who are in a crucial period of growth, what books were important in helping you grow up? Many of these probably weren't timeless, but they were helpful. A timeless and helpful book for me was Wolters' Creation Regained.

Or, maybe you are in a creative mood, and you would like to write a book recipe. Here would be one for getting over yourself that I really could have used my sophomore year of college:

• Book of Romans

• Keller's Counterfeit Gods

• Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos

• Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self

• Back 1/2 of Mere Christianity (on personality)

• Book of Proverbs

Feel free to send in your reflections to madison@ncstudycenter.org.

Happy reading this Christmas,

Madison

A brief liturgy for the end of a semester

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.” —Psalm 122:1 ESV

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep.

We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.

We have offended against your holy laws.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done;

and apart from your grace there is no health in us.

Spare all those who confess their faults. Restore all those who are penitent, according to your promises declared to all people in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may now live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of your holy Name.

Amen.

Grant to your faithful people, merciful Lord, pardon and peace; that we may be cleansed from all our sins, and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Note the emphases on things done and undone, as well as the promise in Christ Jesus of a quiet mind; so appropriate for any of us nearing any finish line.

•

Excerpted from The Book of Common Prayer, Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019

Fall 2019 Finals Schedule

Finals season is upon us. This milestone means many things, including extended hours at the Battle House!

From Porch to Pit: Reflections from a Recent Grad

On a morning walk with Amber Younger, the Director of Christian Life at the NC Study Center, she shared with me a small word of wisdom that shaped my remaining semesters at UNC. At the time, I was half-way through my junior year, feeling overwhelmed. I shared with Amber that I felt weary at the prospect of stewarding everything well. She pointed me to the Lord’s Prayer, where Jesus instructs his disciples to pray for bread for one day at a time. With that language as my model, I too was to ask the Lord only for the wisdom and grace needed to handle each day as it found me.

That wisdom has personally served me well over the past year and a half, but it also reflects a mentality the Study Center embodies. Amidst all the hospitality, events, and life-changing programs, the mission of the organization is never lost, as its activities strategically meet the intellectual, spiritual, and vocational needs of students wherever they are.

The Study Center does not host activity for activity’s sake, but approaches every event as an opportunity to serve God and love people.  Several events and programs stick out to me as remarkable from the last few years. Thanks to the Wilberforce Conference and faith and work lunches like one from Nathan Clendenin, I’ve learned about lives shaped by our vocation to work well and for God’s glory. A talk by Bethany Jenkins directed my discernment in navigating internship decisions, and Tish Harrison Warren taught me about my place in the global church.

In addition to hosting amazing events and programs, the center partners with student efforts to bring thought and creativity to campus. I’ve led multiple student-run organizations that flourish from the support of the study center. We’ve received space, guidance, and expanded reach thanks to the Battle House. I have seen the center bring good ideas to fruition that otherwise might not have the resources to take off. As a result, students are provided with the pragmatic and relational tools to grow holistically.

Probably most important to me, in the quiet moments of each day, the Battle House staff continue to prioritize caring for the soul of every individual student.  Amber exemplified this in her willingness to meet with me regularly, making time to routinely hear me unload my burdens. We sit on the Carolina blue rocking chairs that decorate the porch, sipping complimentary coffee from one of the Battle House’s quirky mugs. She is never rushed or hurried. Instead, in our time together, she seems to offer her heart and time fully to me.

Each day is full of its own programs, interpersonal conversations, and cups of coffee. And each day, the Battle House resolves to steward all parts of it well. I cannot understate the spiritual, vocational, and personal growth I’ve experienced because of the Battle House and the mentorship I’ve received from the staff. As I approach graduation, I can’t imagine my college experience without the North Carolina Study Center.

–Holly Harris, Class of 2019

2018-19 Year in Review Slideshow

Summer is off to a great start here at the Battle House! Our grad and faculty reading group partnering with InterVarsity is in full swing. Summer Bible studies kicked off last week. And the space has been a restful (literally, with quite a few couch naps!) and nurturing, studious place for students taking summer classes.

Below, enjoy a brief look back at all that happened this year at the Battle House. Thank you to every student, volunteer, and supporter who helped bring it to life!

Interested in what else we have going on this summer? Check out our Events page for more!