The Forum The Official Newsletter of the Honors College

Dear Alumni, Friends, and Benefactors of the Honors College,

I hope you and your families are having a blessed and restful summer! As you can see from the beautiful work done by our students in creating this edition of The Forum, Honors College life continues to flourish at Belmont Abbey. Thanks especially to rising senior Christopher Mee and May ‘23 graduates Laura Dimarzio and Helen Behe for their dedication to carrying on the tradition of excellence of The Forum.

The Honors College continues to hit exciting new milestones as we grow in both enrollment and philanthropic support. This May, we graduated the first senior class to include students who attended our Schola high school summer program. In fact, 6 of our 23 graduates are alumni of Schola! Speaking of Schola, we are about to welcome our largest class of 70+ students traveling to join us from 18 states. The program will be staffed by 12 current Honors College students and graduates and have seminars taught on great texts on the theme of “Honor, Humility, and the Christian Life” by our talented Honors College faculty.

Schola is also expanding into Washington D.C. this summer. Dr. Varacalli and Dr. Basil will be leading a four-day commuter program at the Belmont House entitled “A Colloquium on Catholic Statesmanship”. Our 15 inaugural student attendees will engage in socratic seminars on primary texts of the American Catholic political tradition, hear talks by leading Catholic scholars, and visit various think tanks and national landmarks during the week. We are confident that this new program will be a fruitful experience for our talented cohort of young men and women and provide an excellent opportunity for the Honors College to recruit top students in the D.C. area for years to come.

On the Washington D.C. front, The Honors College is also proud to welcome Mr. Emmett McGroarty who will be serving as an Honors College research fellow and Executive Director of the Belmont House. He joined our team in April after serving on the Catholic University of America’s Institute for Human Ecology and is actively pursuing various opportunities for recruitment and fundraising for the Honors College as well as creating opportunities for our current students.

Thanks to the tireless work of Dr. Varacalli’s many interviews with next year’s freshman class, we currently have 45 incoming freshmen entering the Honors College this fall. This is the largest incoming class in the history of the program! The Honors College as a whole will welcome approximately 120 students this fall.

As you can see from the various conferences and speakers this semester, our partnerships with missionally aligned organizations continue to grow. In particular, we were delighted to host the Ciceronian Society Annual Conference, which featured keynote lectures given, by Abbot Placid and Dr. Ian Crowe. In January of 2024, we are looking forward to hosting a conference with long-time partner The CiRCE Institute. The Jack Miller Center and John William Pope Foundation continue to support our programming. We are especially happy to announce that in the coming academic year the Bradley Foundation has become a new supporter of our work. In their generosity, they have provided a grant of $50,000 to help grow the Honors College.

Of course, we are incredibly grateful to all of you who continue to support the work of our students and faculty. Thanks to your gracious gifts, the Honors College was able to reach its $10,000 goal during the spring semester Founder’s Day Challenge! All of the great work that you see in The Forum is impossible without your support. Thank you!

I hope that you enjoy the rest of your summer and we hope you see you at the annual Honors College homecoming reception on the evening of October 6th! You can register here. It is sure to be a wonderful reunion.

God Bless,

Dr. Joseph Wysocki, Dean of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey College

Dr. Nancy Llewellyn has taught for the Abbey for the past six years as an Associate Professor of Latin. Before coming to the Abbey, Dr. Llewellyn taught at Wyoming Catholic College for 10 years. She earned her bachelor’s from Bryn Mawr College, her master’s in Latin from Salesian Pontifical University, and her doctorate in classics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Founder of the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies “SALVI” and the Veterum Sapientia Institute, Dr. Llewellyn will be teaching LA101 Elementary Latin I and LA102 Elementary Latin II as part of an adjusted Honors core curriculum.

Q: Where did you go for school and what was your education like?

A: I was Born and raised in California. I went to public schools there—although it was the 1970s so it was a little bit different than it is now. I went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania for my bachelor’s degree and after that I went to Rome and got the equivalent of a master’s at the Salesian Pontifical University. After that, I came back to the United States and got a doctorate at UCLA. My years in Rome were absolutely wonderful! Just being in Rome is an education in itself. I went there to speak Latin because I had a fix in my head that it just had to be possible to speak latin, even though I didn't know anybody who could. I started with Latin when I was a senior in high school. I was really surprised at how different the Latin class was from my French and German classes. In French and German classes we were expected to speak and write in the language. This was not the case for Latin. I thought this was very strange and couldn’t understand why the same standards of student performance and treating the language in the classroom did not apply to Latin like it did to French and German. When I asked about this the only answer I ever got was that Latin was a dead language. I thought that this was impossible as the Romans most definitely spoke it. They could not have conquered the Mediterranean world in complete silence!

Finally, when I did go to Rome for the first time in 1985, I met the great Father Reginald Foster. He was a real legend, an American Carmelite monk and priest who worked for more than 30 years in the Vatican letters department. He was one of the first people that I met who could speak the language ex tempore. I was absolutely magnetized and I determined the day that I met him that I would not go back home until I could do what he did. In fulfillment of that vow, I intended to stay in Rome for one year but ended up staying for three—those were three of the best years of my life. There, I laid the groundwork for my ability to speak Latin by forcing myself into situations where I had to use the language to speak for attending living Latin events. One of my mentors John Rassias of Dartmouth College once said that “language is like a disease, it's something you have to catch.” I hope to help others catch a case of Latin. During the nearly ten years that I was a doctoral student at UCLA, I started an organization called SALVI which is an organization devoted to helping other people catch a case of latin speaking by running immersion events for teachers and graduate students. Here, at Belmont Abbey College I have worked on a Catholic version of that called the Veterum Sapientia Institute.

Q: What was the most influential class you’ve ever taken or taught?

A: I’ll have to name two. The high school Latin class where I started learning Latin as a senior because that provided the occasion for experiencing this extreme contrast between a living language and a dead language. There is nothing dead about Latin. If you think about it, it is illogical to call any language living or dead for that matter. Language is a communication system and they are living if people choose to use them or dead if people don’t. You can make English a dead language if you treat it the way that many people have treated Latin.

The other class I’ll mention is the day that I sat in on Regi Foster’s class. After years and years of thinking that it had to be possible to speak Latin, I finally met someone who could. He had no prepared remarks of any kind. He was talking about robots and artificial intelligence in response to a newspaper article that someone had handed him. It happened to be the one day in the week in his summer school program where he spent the afternoon translating and talking about a newspaper article about robots. I was shocked to discover how much I could understand based on the passive knowledge that I already had based upon the translation-based Latin classes. Regi Foster always said that learning Latin is a matter of character more than intelligence. It is a matter of persistence and a willingness to try, express oneself, to make mistakes and keep going.

Q: What brought you to the Abbey and why did you decide to teach here?

A: I was recruited out of Wyoming Catholic College. I had gone to WCC in 2007 as a founding faculty of that institution in its first academic year and I was continuing to do weekend workshops and immersion for SALVI. By 2011, I was doing workshops in WV when I met a seminarian of the Diocese of Charlotte who has since been ordained and is now Father Jason Barone. He was finishing up his seminarian studies and joined one of my workshops. Well he kept coming back and called me in 2012, asking if I could do a workshop for priests. That turned into the very first Veterum Sapientia which was held in the summer of 2013 in our very own Student Commons. Fr. Reginald Foster was our main faculty then and agreed to come out with 55 other people crammed into that room. In the course of the week that we spent there, Fr. Barone and some of his colleagues including Fr. Kauth, rector of the future seminary, took me out for a coffee over at Holy Grounds and said that they were starting a seminary and asked if I would teach Latin. I remember being so struck by the directness of the question that I just stared at them. I felt my jaw open and felt my own voice say “yes.” We’ve continued to teach the Veterum Sapientia workshop every year so this year will be the 10th anniversary year. I teach both seminarian and BAC Latin classes happily. We are moving into a new phase right now because the Honors College has instituted a classical languages requirement that kicks in in September that we will be teaching alongside the current Honors curriculum. Because the Honors College curriculum deals so intensely with ancient texts and ancient history, the students are a bit like seminarians in that they have an additional motivation for studying these things. Like anything in life, the more you put in the more you get back out of it. Furthermore, most of our seminarians are in the Honors College. Latin is good for the lay students and also the seminarians as future priests.

Q: How did you get involved with the Honors College?

A:I have known Dr. Joseph Wysocki for as long as I’ve taught here. This is my sixth year here, and Joe has at least been here twice as long as I have. What really got things rolling was when Dr. Christine Basil signed up to audit my LA101 class as a student. It was absolutely delightful to have her in class, and I know that the other students enjoyed her presence there too. She clearly enjoyed it, and I think she and Joe talked a lot about it. I suspect that her participation contributed significantly to the new requirement, I don’t know, but that’s my guess.

Q: What is one lesson every student should learn while in college?

A: That is a great question and whatever I say will not suffice. Honestly, looking at my own life, one should learn by experience that failure is survivable and that it can even be creative. As a teacher I am not out to make my students fail, but Honors College students in particular have probably gone through their entire schooling having not bombed out on anything and it is potentially hazardous. It is a bit like falling down. When you are a kid, you learn that you can get up and keep running, but when you are older it hurts more and it can make you scared of running because you are afraid of falling. The importance of experiencing failure and learning that you can get up again and can go on to succeed is a really important life skill.

When I failed, I spent a lot of time grieving and feeling loss, thinking “who am I” in an echoey existential way. Eventually, though, I started asking more productive questions. Less “who am I” and more “why did this happen? What could I have done differently? What did I need that I did not get? What could I have given that I did not give to have a better outcome?” If you find yourself in the dumps because you failed at something, the key is not to get stuck in that first self-absorbed phase of taking it as a verdict on yourself. Take time to lick your wounds, but do not get stuck inside of yourself forever. Start asking yourself questions to get you out of yourself. I have a family member who did not learn what failure was until quite late in life and it made her afraid to try new things because of the fear of failing at them. This, for a bright motivated person, is a tragedy and leads to a lifetime of unfulfilled potential.

Q: Do you have a favorite Latin word or lesson?

A: I’ve been talking about Latin more or less non-stop for the better part of 30 years. My favorite Latin word is “sidera” which means stars. I love stars, stars are beautiful. It is a non-ordinary word for stars. Stella is the word that we are used to. Sidera is an unusually elegant word for stars and something about it just seems like the perfect combination of vowels and consonants working together—it seems to sparkle.

The license plate on my car says Galina because most of the time I go around with a rubber chicken in the back windshield. The rubber chicken has been a personal mascot of mine for over a decade. When I was at WCC, one of my students, who was a natural comic, walked into the classroom with a rubber chicken. Since then, I started using it in the classroom and it proved to be helpful as a pointer or as a dummy or a ball. If I wanted to demonstrate the word “to throw” it was a prop that I could throw. **a chuckle from the interviewer** Your laughter proves my point—the rubber chicken is intrinsically funny. How scary can Latin be if your teacher is running around the room brandishing a rubber chicken!

Q: If you could learn any new subject or skill, what would it be?

A: Had we but world enough and time! There are so many things that I would like to learn. I have been trying fitfully to get to the point of competency, forget expertise, on a musical instrument since childhood and I haven’t made it yet but I would love to learn to play the piano decently. I would love to learn American Sign Language. I know enough to be dangerous. I use a certain vocabulary of signs in Latin class as a sort of bridge language. Because I teach primarily in an immersion environment I want my students to be able to say “stop” or “repeat that” with hand signs so that they do not need to go back to the English. I love the way ASL looks—it is so fluid and at the same time so precise.

I’d like to learn another language. There is an organization in the United States that is a sort of Welsh version of SALVI. They run Welsh classes in the summer and I’d love to do that as half my ethnic heritage is from Wales.

I’d also like to learn a completely different language. I would also love to learn a non-Indo European language. I’d love to do something like Magyar (Hungarian) or an African language or a Native American language like Cherokee or Shoshoni.

Q: If you could live anywhere for a year, where would it be?

A: I would love to spend a year in Vienna or London. I guess I have a weakness for imperial cities. But, I’d also love to spend a year in New York, which I guess is also another imperial city. I think every American ought to spend time in NY because so many things from NY have wound themselves into general American culture. If you are American you need to know where the Bronx is or if you’ve heard the phrase Delancey Street, you need to know where it is. Delancey Street is also near Bleecker Street. There is actually an opera called the Saint of Bleecker Street. I love Opera, so most of the times I've gone to New York I’ve gone to the Met. As long as I have worked here, I have always wanted to start an opera society. I did start one at WCC. We drove from Lander to Denver or Salt Lake City to go to the Opera and both of those trips were totally worth it! My all time favorite is Puccini's “Turandot.” It is wonderful, some of his best music. I had the great privilege of seeing Franco Zeffirelli’s production of “Turandot” at the MET. It was such a feast for the eyes that when the second curtain went up on the second act on the palace of the emperor of China, the audience burst out into applause just for the set.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the Latin courses you will offer as part of the Honors College. How will learning the language enhance a Great Books education?

A: We will start with two sections of LA101, two sections which will be a first, we’ve never done that as far as I have been here. Many Honors College students have had significant Latin experience in high school, but the blessing is that the textbook we use, Orberg’s Lingua Latina is written entirely in Latin. Originally designed for a correspondence course, it is a gem of a book written in such a way that it is possible for a committed and mature reader to figure it out. In this way, it is possible for students to think about the language and apply their own intelligence towards understanding. Dr. Gerry Malsburgy once called Orberg's book an “adventure in thinking” and I have actually seen it make people smarter. If a person learns to do the kind of proactive thinking and if I as a teacher help my students understand the kind of thinking they need to cultivate to use the book well, it actually makes them better thinkers all across the board. People have been jabbering endlessly for the better part of 25 years about critical thinking to not much effect. Orberg fixes that, as it requires you to develop very muscular critical thinking skills.

There is a famous old quote from Marshall McLuhan who had said that “the medium is the message.” We live in the age of google translate and this makes us think wrongly that we’ve read Tolstoy if we’ve read an English translation or that we’ve read Aristotle or Cicero if we’ve read an English translation. It is not true. We can get an idea of what they were talking about, but the qualitative experience of reading an author in their own language and then reading it in translation is like watching a movie with the sound off and subtitled on. While you get an idea of what happened, you don't get the full experience of the film. There is a whole realm of nuances, emotional impact which informs the actual meaning of the movie. All that goes when the original language goes.