Founders Day -Humanities

Humanities: English, History, & Interdisciplinary Studies

It seems appropriate that the Humanities, as cornerstones of Benedictine liberal arts education, make their home in the very first administrative and educational buildings on Belmont Abbey’s campus, built with the bricks our first monks formed from local clay. 

Moreover, today’s BAC Humanities show vigorous signs of new growth! Humanities leadership have exciting plans to enrich the Abbey’s already nationally recognized undergraduate educational experience, and you can join them. Your gift today helps to cultivate tomorrow’s critical thinkers and communicators, not only equipping them with the requisite skills to excel in their chosen professions, but also encouraging them to embrace the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as lifelong learners.

English

The English Department hosts more core classes than any other program on campus. Exploring literature and the English language, students develop as thinkers and writers, engaging across genres and eras with what it means to be human and how we make sense of experiential reality through narrative, verse, drama, and informational texts. In English classes, students participate in the ongoing conversations that inform cultural and personal values, negotiating the relationships between form and content, signifier and sign.

Thanks to your generosity to last year’s Founders’ Day Campaign, Dr. Farrell O’Gorman’s English Department provided enrichment and networking experiences for students: sponsoring student membership in the North Carolina Writers’ Network and attendance the NCWN Conference and the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

This year, your contribution responds to even greater needs. Your gift to English this Founders’ Day will go toward:

• Facilitating further student participation in conferences and professional associations, including the North Carolina Writers’ Network and the biennial Conference on the Catholic Literary Imagination
• Creating and funding regular teaching, writing, and research internship opportunities

History

Belmont Abbey’s History Department offers a type of context critical to understanding, not only who we are as a culture, but also how human agency and human societies have understood themselves, their past, and their relationships to each other. History provides a deeper understanding of how and why we pursued the good and express the meaning of community, leadership, and identity. 

Last year’s Founders’ Day funds enabled BAC History to sponsor and provide lectures, conferences, and experiential learning opportunities for students throughout the Humanities.  

This year, you can expand these opportunities, enabling Dr. Patrick Wadden and his fellow department faculty to: 

• Offer further student trips to local museums, archives, and historical sites
• Develop new course opportunities engaging Catholic culture and Southern history

Support the Humanities at Belmont Abbey College

Your support addresses the needs of these dynamic and essential Departments, creating not only enrichment opportunities, but also vital curricular expansion, across the Humanities. 

Moreover, supporting BAC Humanities supports all students, who develop foundational skills in their core classes. All majors, vocations, and careers benefit from robust Humanities, which help to cultivate in all of us the capacities to think critically, to communicate, and to practice excellence and virtue in community.  

And, as a special thank you for your donation to the Founders’ Day Challenge, we will send you novelty Belmont Abbey swag! When you give $10, you receive a glow-in-the-dark ultimate BAC frisbee. When you give $50 you receive a glow-in-the-dark ultimate BAC frisbee and a BAC canvas tote bag. To commemorate Belmont Abbey’s 148th year, when you give a gift of $148 (or $13/month) you will receive four BAC black and gold leather coasters, a bag of St. Benedict hazelnut coffee and the BAC canvas tote bag.