The Fall Semester at the CSC

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

In this week’s podcast, Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas highlight the study center’s offerings after the first full week of fall programming.

As Mike and Richard noted, there is still space available in all but Dr. Horner’s in-person director’s class. Please feel free to join in on any of our offerings. You can email Mike directly with any questions about the program: mike@christianstudycenter.org.

Study Center Resources

The full fall program is now underway. This week, both Mike and Richard taught in-person and Zoom sections of their director’s classes. As you’ve already noted, audio of those classes will be made available through this newsletter/podcast feed.

The Dante reading group is seven cantos into Purgatorio. Participation is open to all, near and far. If you are interested in joining, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org.

We enjoyed our first discussion of Zena Hitz’s Lost In Thought. In our next meeting on Tuesday, September 29th, Prof. Hitz will join us for an interview and Q/A. Please feel free to join in even if you have not read the book, although, of course, we do encourage you to read Hitz’s powerful testimony to the value of the life of the mind.

This newsletter will be a hub for our digital presence. Along with twice-monthly essays you can expect twice monthly conversations with Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas, audio of the director’s classes, and occasional interviews with scholars and writers of interest to our community.

Dr. Esau McCaulley Book Launch

Please note as well that the study center is co-sponsoring the book launch for Dr. Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope hosted by the North Carolina Study Center on Wednesday September 23 at 8PM. Dr. McCaulley is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America You can visit the event page for more details and you can register here.

Recommended Reading

— From “The Cassiodorus Necessity: Keeping the Faith Alive through Christian Education” by Richard Hughes Gibson:

Yet in periods of crisis like our own, our intellectual supply lines become visible. We are reminded that they are fragile like us, and that their maintenance demands investment – of money certainly, but equally importantly of space and time, the space and time of learning. In The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs reminds us that in the midst of World War II a number of leading Christian intellectuals – Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil – dedicated themselves to the task of imagining education’s future. They wondered: What kind of schooling will the citizens of postwar Western societies require? What role might the Christian tradition play in their education? They, too, were asking how “what has been received” might be passed on to the rising generation. The pandemic has made this question a pressing one once again, given its massive disruption of the business of education, Christian or otherwise.

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