On the one hand, the students want to go deeper than their high school reading of Homer and Shakespeare. On the other hand, most of them are not aiming for a life in academia. They want to find a college where they can read Thucydides and be prepared for a vocation. Two questions are in tension: 1) why invest in more liberal arts education when one has already paid for 12 years of it? 2) where can students continue to cultivate wisdom as they prepare for adulthood? Professors from St. John’s College, Belmont Abbey College, The Constantine College, Union University, and Wyoming Catholic College will be available for questions about what their schools uniquely offer classically educated students.
Jessica Hooten Wilson
Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov, which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy: The Search for Influence: Walker Percy and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (Louisiana State University Press, 2018); most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, an NEH grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship. In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hiett Prize in Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
Dr. Joseph Wysocki
Dr. Wysocki is the Dean of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey College, he holds a PhD in Political Science from Baylor University and lives in Gastonia, NC with his wife Jeanne and six children.
Dr. Timothy E.G. Bartel
Dr. Bartel holds a PhD in Divinity from the University of St. Andrews and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Seattle Pacific University. His essays and poems have appeared in Christianity and Literature, Notes & Queries, Pilgrimage, Saint Katherine Review, and Windhover. Timothy’s academic specialty is the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he is the author Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory: Deification and Divine Light in Longfellow’s “Evangeline” (Wipf & Stock, 2019). Timothy has also published three collections of poems, including Aflame But Unconsumed (Kelsay Books, 2019), and Arroyos: Sijo and Other Poems (Mariscat Press, 2015), which was named a “Book of 2015” by the Scottish Poetry Library. He is one of the founding faculty members of The College at The Saint Constantine School, helping shape the writing and literature curriculum. In his free time, Timothy designs chapbooks and paints miniatures. Though his first love is poetry, he is not above reading Star Wars and Warhammer novels for fun. Timothy and his wife Hope have three children: Gwen, Roman, and Nina. They attend St. Joseph Orthodox Church in Houston.
Dr. Scott Huelin
Dr. Scott Huelin has taught literature and theology at the secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels. His research interests include philosophical hermeneutics; literary theory; the history and sociology of reading; biblical hermeneutics; the history of Christian theology, ethics, and spirituality; and classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature. His published essays and book reviews have appeared in Literature and Theology, Religion & Literature, Christian Scholar's Review, Christianity & Literature, Christian Reflection, the Journal of Religion, the Cresset, and the Journal of the National Council of Honors Colleges. Dr. Huelin was selected as Union’s Faculty of the Year for 2017-18.
Jason Baxter
Associate Professor of Humanities at WCC. His monograph, The Infinite Beauty of the World: Dante’s Encyclopedia and the Names of God (2020), explores the spiritual meaning of the Comedy’s famous “encyclopedism.” He has also has written An Introduction to Christian Mysticism (Baker Academic, 2021); A Beginner's Guide to the Divine Comedy (Baker, 2018).
Melissa Schubert
Melissa Schubert serves as the Dean of Biola University's School of Humanities and Social Sciences, with a deep commitment to the future of biblically-centered, transformational Christian liberal arts education. She taught for sixteen years in Torrey Honors College, teaching across its interdisciplinary curriculum, mentoring its dear students and gifted faculty, and serving as its Associate Director. Her research primarily investigates the dynamics of literature and theology in early modern English literature, and her interests range across genres, centuries, and practices that enrich the Christian life and imagination.