The Forum The Official Newsletter of the Honors College

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

This spring we celebrate an important milestone for the Honors College. On May 14th, our graduating seniors became the first class to complete the Honors College’s new four-year great books curriculum, becoming the first official Honors College graduates!

This first major “completion” for us has caused me to reflect back on the last four years. In doing so, I am struck with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and excitement about the future. I am grateful for this senior class and their willingness to take a risk on our new curriculum, for the return of Dr. Basil to Belmont Abbey College and her tireless efforts to build our community, to Dr. Thuot for his labor in developing our curriculum, and to the faculty who continue to serve as teachers of the new curriculum. I am also grateful for your continued friendship and inspiring increase in financial support for this new endeavor.

The occasion has also given me the opportunity to think about the incredible combination of the best traditions of the old Honors Institute and Honors Program with the wonderful additions of the past four years. As you can see above, our students still treasure cultural events in Charlotte, their sophomore Shakespeare beach retreat in Hilton Head, many of the great books that were taught in the previous programs such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and a strong community life.

However, as our editions of The Forum (Themselves a new tradition!) have shown, the past four years have brought new traditions, partnerships, and programming. We now gather for at least two bonfire and sing-a-long nights every semester, weekly women’s office hours, regular games of ultimate frisbee, hikes, and an annual Honors Alumni Homecoming Reception and Twelfth Night Party. This week, many of our upper-classmen departed for our inaugural “Abbey in Ireland” summer study abroad program directed by Dr. O’Gorman and Dr. Wadden. Stay tuned for in-depth coverage in next fall’s edition of The Forum.

Our continuing partnership with the John William Pope Foundation has helped us to reach more prospective students who are yearning for real liberal education. Generous support from the Jack Miller Center and the Lilly Fellows Program has allowed us to host three intercollegiate conferences and numerous top-notch guest speakers. Private donations have allowed us to begin planning a renovation of the Honors College’s unofficial “home,” Grace Auditorium. More on this soon!

Our summer Schola program for high school students, which began by hosting twenty students in 2017, has a record-breaking seventy-two students registered for this summer. Current Honors College students who attended Schola four years ago as high school students are now serving the program as counselors!

So much more could be said but I’d like to conclude with one exciting announcement that embodies the fruitful combination of our past, present, and future. Dr. Tom Varacalli, Honors Institute Class of ‘11, will be returning to Belmont Abbey College next fall to serve as a full-time Honors College faculty member. Those of you who know Dr. Varacalli will remember his warmth, intelligence, and diligent work. We are delighted to have him join our community and have no doubt that the next generation of Honors College students will benefit immensely from his presence both inside and outside of the classroom.

Have a wonderful summer. We look forward to seeing you at homecoming next fall!

Sincerely,

Dr. Wysocki

Dr. Farrell O'Gorman has been teaching English at Belmont Abbey for many years and is currently head of the English Department. He began teaching for the Honors Institute, and has remained with the program through its transition to the Honors College. He started his education at the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his B.A on a Navy ROTC scholarship. He then received his M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. O'Gorman has previously spent time teaching at Wake Forest University, the University of Mississippi State, and DePaul University in Chicago.

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

A: I went to the University of Notre Dame on a Navy ROTC scholarship. This was the 1980s, and Reagan was president, and building up the military. And back then ROTC would let you major in whatever you wanted. My major was in Notre Dame’s Great Books program, which had ties to the University of Chicago’s Great Books program. Thanks to ROTC requirements, I also got to take some interesting Navigation classes, memorize Soviet submarines, and take two semesters of physics with pre-med students! But I realized that I loved the classes in my major, and I knew within a year that I wanted to teach in college. My father taught, so it was in the family. There were points where I was interested in theology or philosophy, but literature interested me the most. For me, everything intersected in literature. Dante, Dostoevsky—they could take theology and philosophy and give it flesh and bones in a way that made pure philosophy or theology look abstract in comparison.

We didn’t study as much American literature as I would have liked, though. We read Moby Dick, some of The Federalist Papers, Walden, and some Tocqueville. So while I was in the military I tried to catch up reading American history and literature on my own. When I went to grad school in English, I had become interested in Catholic writers from the American South in particular, writers like Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. I’m from South Carolina, so all this led me deciding to go to grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill. After being in the Midwest and California for college and the military, I wanted to be close to home again, and Chapel Hill had a very strong English program at the time.

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

I would have to say the classes I took with Kent Emery at Notre Dame. He was a medievalist, and an expert on medieval philosophy. I took several courses with him. I remember him teaching Plato, Augustine’s Confessions, Dante, and Chaucer. He was a passionate professor who could connect theology, philosophy, and literature. Although I ended up going in a different direction than medieval studies, it was his influence that helped me become really interested in literature. He was a great teacher. His classes were seminar style, and I remember when we were reading the Apology and talking about the death of Socrates. I remember him looking around the table and saying, “You killed Socrates!” It was like the reading of the Passion during Holy Week. There was that real and very present understanding that it’s my fault and I am really involved in this story. He brought literature to life through linguistics and narrative—it really impacted the way I thought about my studies.

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

A: My father went to school here in the 1950’s. All my relatives have lived in South Carolina since before the Civil War. Growing up, my father’s family would send their kids to Catholic colleges, though there weren’t many nearby. My grandfather’s generation all went to Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland. Belmont Abbey became a four-year college in the 50s, so my dad went here. So I knew about the Abbey all my life.

I knew from my own undergraduate experience that I wanted to teach at a Catholic liberal arts institution. I finished my PhD in 2000 at Chapel Hill. If a job had been open at the Abbey back then, I would’ve taken it. In grad school I had come here and met with the Vice President of Academic Affairs, Fr. Placid Solari— at the time. I arranged to take BAC students to Ireland in the late 90s to study Irish literature. I was an adjunct in the summers, though not a full-time faculty member.

I learned a lot from teaching at other places for twelve years before I came here for good in 2012, and I’m very grateful for the journey. I spent three years as a visiting assistant professor at Wake Forest and four years as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University, where I taught American and southern literature. Then I was invited to apply for a job at DePaul University in Chicago, in their Catholic Studies program, in 2007. They wanted to start a small Catholic liberal arts college within this massive university. I became an associate professor and earned tenure there. But when a position finally opened up at BAC, I chose to come here.

A nice thing about being at the Abbey is that you get to talk with many professors who work in different areas than you do. At most of the larger universities I had been at, I was astounded at how little the English department interacted with the history department, or philosophy department, etc. I was eager not only to be in a Catholic institution, but to speak with people in different departments and develop my knowledge of how the disciplines intersect. Soon after arriving at BAC, I began teaching classes for the old Honors Institute. But when the new Honors college began, Dr. Wysocki asked me to teach classes and I was happy to continue working with Honors students.

Q: What was your favorite class you ever taught? What was your favorite Honors class to teach?

A: I currently teach three Honors College classes. I have had the most experience teaching “The American Founding” with Dr. Wysocki, which I really enjoy. I get to listen to him lead discussions on the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. I had not thought about all the things we talk about in that course in many years, or in that much depth. It’s always exciting to do team teaching, as it gives you a different perspective on things. Students enjoy it too, I think because of the change of pace.

Within the Honors College, I am currently teaching Modernity: The Poet’s Vision for the first time. That course bear some resemblance to my favorite class to teach in the English Department, which is called Christianity and Contemporary Fiction and focuses on post-World War II authors such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry. In his essay “Notes for a Novel for the End of the World,” Percy talks about the challenge that such Christian authors have in writing in the 20th or 21st century. In some sense, for many Western readers, the vocabulary of Christendom seems to have been worn out. The challenge for the writer is how to tell the good news in a way that makes it sound new, not cliched. Percy believes in sin, grace, and redemption, but knows that many people have a curtain fall over their eyes when they hear those words. They can’t engage with the realities behind the words because the words themselves have been devalued in their eyes and over the course of Western cultural history. The challenge is to tell the same old true story, but in a new and engaging way.

Many of these writers are a little wary of being labeled as Christian or Catholic because some people will automatically ignore them. They don’t want to just preach to the choir, but to reach a broad audience. So, in that class, we talk about how these authors negotiate those questions. There’s a way in which I think many of them want to be evangelical, but not be dismissively labeled as such.

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

A: First, a student should gain a strong awareness of the major intellectual and cultural conversations that have come before them, and that have shaped the moment they’re in. College is the one place where you have a chance to develop a coherent sense of that. Secondly, I always hope that students simultaneously gain some humility—and realize that we don’t know everything. Students with a good liberal arts education understand this deeply. When you put those two things together, you graduate with an enhanced sense of intellectual curiosity. You have a great foundation on which to build, but you know that you’ve got to keep reading, thinking, and asking questions.

Q: If you could get lunch with any author who would it be?

A: I think with Walker Percy, to hear Percy talk about where we are at today. I know I’m picking someone who’s very recent in the big scheme of things, but I’d like to hear Percy’s take on our culture right now. It has changed in a lot of important ways since his time.

I first read Percy between my Junior and Senior year of college, a book called Love in the Ruins that I picked up over the summer. Within the first few pages he was talking about Descartes, Aquinas—and yet it was set in the American South. I felt that although I hadn’t encountered him formally in a classroom, all of my education had prepared me to encounter Percy. He took everything I had studied and brought it to bear on where and when I lived. He died just about 30 years ago, but he expressed a great deal of concern for the future. I’d just like to sit down with him now, after he’d had a few days to take a look around at where we are—and hear what he has to say about it.