Cancellations and Adjustments Due to Coronavirus

Dear Friends,
 
I write to tell you how the North Carolina Study Center is adjusting to the COVID-19 crisis as an organization and to provide a few thoughts on how we may respond as a community.
 
Over one week ago, we canceled a spring break trip to Israel for 40 UNC students and two of our staff out of concerns our travelers would end up quarantined. Going forward, the Study Center will be looking to UNC’s policies for guidance regarding public spaces, educational activities, and large group gatherings. Accordingly, we are canceling our events for the next three weeks (hopefully to be scheduled again next year) and plan to continue discussion seminars and our Fellows classes online.
 
In terms of our general hospitality, we will be closed for the rest of UNC’s extended spring break (3/16-20). To the extent that UNC prioritizes social distancing and encourages students to remain away from campus for the common good, our hospitality will follow suit. You can see UNC’s most recent statements here. We are considering remaining closed to general traffic after 3/20, and will make further announcements next week on our news page.
 
How do we best honor our mission and serve Christ in our current situation? As Dr. Luke Bretherton recently noted in a letter to his students at Duke Divinity School, our concern is to ensure the medical system is not overwhelmed by rapidly increasing demand. So, out of care for the wider community and in solidarity with those who care for the sick, we must adjust.

This introduces a thought for our many students. Although you are in a low-risk demographic, you come from somewhere. I encourage you to reach out to those you know who are likely afraid. Let your parents and grandparents know you love them. Tell your aunts and uncles what their past care has meant to you. Remember your Sunday school teachers, sports coaches, and the many others who have supported you.

In light of these changed circumstances, we at the Study Center are discerning new ways to offer Christian life, education, and formation to members of the UNC community. For now, our staff will be available to students for conversation and care by phone, email, and video conference. And we will be announcing opportunities to continue our theological educational programs.
 
As we make strategic adjustments and prepare, our hearts cannot be set on the news cycle. God’s grace is sufficient and doesn’t change. We are invited to live in the world of Scripture, where death is expected around the corner but God’s kingdom presses in more urgently with a deeper peace. “In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.” (Ps. 4:8)
 
We are sad to think of a spring with an empty living room. Yet, this period of hardship can be deeply formative if we let it teach us a lasting humility and awareness of our true everyday state. Every day Jesus Christ comes for the sick, not for the healthy, and his eternal riches are on offer. He will give them to us if we will ask.
 
In Christ,

Madison Perry
Executive Director

Five Novels to Deepen the Soul

Students and staff reading Augustine’s Confessions together in one of our seminars this spring.

Writer and teacher Jonathan Rogers once said that “good stories make us feel differently and more deeply about the things we’ve known all along.”

In light of his thought on how a great book can enlarge our souls, I wanted to share quotes from five of my favorite novels. Each story can help you feel more deeply about something that perhaps you’ve known all along.

1. How to feel deeper about the hard right choice: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

“I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man…Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?” 

2. How to feel deeper about loving your enemy: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

3. How to feel deeper about the world to come: Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

“I moved ever higher on the land, here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, scattered in another, as though planted by random throw, but all were heavy trunked and capaciously limbed, and they were fruit trees, every one of them. Apples, gold-skinned apricots, immaculate pears. The leaves about them were thick and cool and stirred at my approach; touched with a finger, they imparted a palpable rhythm…

The place had a master! Realizing this, I knew he was already aware of me—comforting and fearful knowledge. Still I wanted to see him. The farther I went the more I seemed to know or remember about him—the way he'd planted this orchard, walking over the hills, casting seed from his hand.”

4. How to feel deeper about ordinary, well-lived lives: Middlemarch by George Eliot

“…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

5. How to feel deeper about loving your neighbor: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

“There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.”

Kari

In Everything Give Thanks

You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: 'Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.' I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

– Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry

I’ve had a new way of looking at the commands of God lately. Commands like the one in Wendell Berry’s quote, in everything give thanks. We can be tempted to see God’s decrees as arbitrary or constraining. But if God is who He says He is, Creator of the world, source of living Truth, then perhaps we should see his commands as the most solemn secrets. He leans down and whispers to us, live like this because I’ve made the world like this.

His decrees are windows into the workings of the universe. The more we walk in them, the more we’ll see the true nature of things and grow into the people He first willed us to be, when he breathed life into fine-crafted dust and awoke the pinnacle of his creativity. 

If God tells us to give thanks in everything, might He be trying to show us that all of life is worth our gratitude? It would make no sense, after all, to be thankful for something of no value. If He commands appreciation for our days, it is because those days, particularly this one right in front of you, is brimming full of goodness.

But that goodness is not a light thing, nor a thing often easily perceived. Today, it may be at the back of boredom or pain or anxiety or loneliness. We certainly walk in shadowed lands, and perhaps for you, those shadows are looming large and blocking any errant ray of light.

There are sleepless nights and spilled coffee. There are severed friendships, unanswered longings, and deep grooves of injustice. There is despair welling up on a Monday morning. There are the unheeded cries of the innocent and those who live in bondage to the opinions of their neighbors. 

And yet. 

Gratitude isn’t blindness or a lie. It is not a blatant denial of reality. 

Gratitude is grasping hold of that second sight, the inheritance lost by our first parents and reclaimed by the new Adam.

It is a constant turning toward our lives, opening ourselves up to both the surprising moments of grace glimpsed clearly and to the hardships where grace is working out our transformation just outside the reach of our senses. 

It is a trust in the goodness of our Creator, who speaks in everything give thanks as a promise, pulling us ever onward toward resurrection.

And while none of us are all the way capable of so much, the first step is to believe these are the right instructions.

Kari

Our Spring 2020 Programming

Seminars

Augustine’s Confessions
9 weeks, led by Matt Hoehn

Join us for a study of Augustine’s Confessions, the gripping spiritual journey of the greatest post-biblical Christian thinker of the Church’s first thousand years.  We will walk alongside Augustine through his youthful spiritual wanderings, his insatiable quest for love and truth, his grief over death and loss, and the eventual heart-rest he discovered in the good news of the Gospel.  Augustine has been called ‘our post-modern patron saint’ and though written 1600 years ago, it is amazing how relatable Confessions is to our questions and our questing today.

Called By God: A Study on Calling, Discernment, and Vocation
7 weeks, led by Dr. Jeremy Purvis, Matt Hoehn and visiting professionals

Dr. Jeremy Purvis (UNC Associate Professor, Genetics), Joy Purvis, and Matt Hoehn are co-leading a seminar on faith, work and vocational discernment using Tim Keller and Katharine Leary Alsdorf’s book Every Good Endeavor. In addition to readings and discussion that establish a biblical framework for understanding ‘work’, the seminar features a series of guests from different vocational fields sharing with students about how the topic explored that week maps onto their life and work.

'Meat with Local Business Leaders
6 weeks, led by Dan Copeland and Benton Moss

You may be thinking about a job at a big company, a small family company, or even starting your own thing. Local businessmen from Chapel Hill, Carolina students, and recent graduates will be getting together to talk about work and how to make it fulfilling. They'll work their way through the Praxis Business Course, 'meating' six times throughout January, February, March and April. Yes, this is a 'meating' — smoked sausage, ribs, baked potatoes. So come and feed your mind, body, and spirit and experience growth in Christ through conversation about faith in the workplace.

Life and Thought of Walker Percy
Weekly, led by Bill Boyd

Recipient of the U.S. National Book of the Year Award for his debut novel The Moviegoer (1961), author Walker Percy is one of UNC’s more underappreciated alumni. A sincere Christian, Percy’s novels and essays explore in one form or another the plight of modern man and the place of faith in contemporary America. While the reading group is designed to introduce artistically or literarily inclined students to this important Christian thinker and author, all are welcome.

Major Events

Why are Americans so Afraid of Death? | January 27

Christianity in Conversation Luncheons are hosted jointly by the North Carolina Study Center and InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries.  The format is to host a faculty whose scholarship is in some way significant for Christian thought.  The goal is to leaven the intellectual life of UNC, to provide a forum for ‘the big questions’ (God, truth, meaning, the good life, etc.) that too often go unaddressed, and to serve as a sustained Christian presence within the institutional life of UNC.  The primary target audience is faculty members, graduate students, intellectually leading undergraduate students and to a lesser degree, community members.

An Evening with James KA Smith | February 20

Join us at UNC for an evening with Christian thought leader and award-winning author, James KA Smith!  Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College where he holds the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology & Worldview.  He will be sharing about his newly released and much celebrated book On the Road with Saint Augustine in which Smith is our guide, showing us how "Augustine’s timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death."

Parents Conference | February 22

Parents of current UNC students are invited to enjoy a weekend in Chapel Hill and a Saturday morning program, hosted by the North Carolina Study Center Parent’s Council, in collaboration with the staff.  This year’s conference speaker is Bill Boyd, Director of Spiritual Formation.  He will be speaking on ‘Establishing Expectations During the College Years.’

An Evening with Dr. Robert P. George and Dr. Cornel West | April 3 

Join us to hear Dr. Robert P George and Dr. Cornel West host a collegial and thought-provoking discussion about faith, friendship and dialogue across deep personal and political differences.  Cornel West is a prominent and provocative intellectual.  He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and has also recorded three spoken word albums.  Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.  The NC Study Center is serving as a cohost of this event in partnership with the UNC Program for Public Discourse in the College of Arts and Sciences.

LDOXA | April 24

Inspired by the Greek word doxa (meaning ‘glory’), our annual LDOC (Last Day of Class) celebration is a time for students to drop by the Battle House and celebrate the last day of with smoothies and lawn games.

To Read is Human

Study Center staff Bill Boyd met with with Dr. Thomas Pfau of Duke University to talk about the formative personal and cultural discipline that is “reading.” Listen to their conversation on SoundCloud or below.

Study center staff member Bill Boyd met with with Dr. Thomas Pfau of Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill to talk about the formative personal and cultural discipline that is "reading.” More at ncstudycenter.org/news

Authors and works referenced by Dr. Pfau:

• Julius Caesar - The Gallic Wars (Latin, De Bello Gallico)

• Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

• Henry Fielding

• Thomas Paine - Common Sense

• Joseph Andrews - first English novel in 1742, “a comic epic poem in prose”

• Tom Jones - bildungsroman and picaresque literature

• Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich)

• Jane Austen - Persuasion, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey

• Stendahl (Henri Beyle) - The Red & the Black (French-English tr. by Margaret Shaw)

• Gustav Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education

• Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good & Evil

• Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain

• Seamus Heaney - Opened Ground, Death of a Naturalist, North, Field Work, Station Island

• Rainer Maria Rilke - The Duino Elegies, Letters to a Young Poet

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poetry & Prose (Norton Critical Edition)

• William Wordsworth (stop after 1807)

• John Keats (start after 1817)

• J.M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace

• Vasily Grossman - Life & Fate, Everything Flows

• Czeslaw Milosz - The Captive Mind, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition

• T.S. Eliot - Poems, 1909-1925

This season is the perfect time to go to a local bookseller and buy a “shamelessly canonical” book for a friend or family member. Celebrate the Word made flesh with words made visible in print. 🙂

Interested in more?

• Leo Tolstoy Creates a List of the 50+ Books That Influenced Him Most (1891)

• The 10 Books By Leo Tolstoy You Have To Read

Books as ladders to an invigorated imagination

Dear friends,

At the study center we are reflecting on building a library of formational books. Just as importantly, we are drawing from friends to learn what books to recommend when. Reading a good book at the wrong time might be just as bad as reading a bad book at any time. And reading a sequence of good books may be far better than jumping straight into a demanding book and only finishing the first half of it.

And, if you permit me a final thought, it may be very profitable to read a bad book at the right time -- after you have the resources to sufficiently critique it, or maybe as a way to exhaust the appeal of something so nakedly awful.

So, what books have been important to you? Was there a necessary order to reading them?

We'd love your thoughts. What follows are ways of answering.

Was there a ladder of books that you followed? Maybe you began with something familiar to your parents and ended up somewhere slightly different but also helpful. The dream would be a Great Books progression, but most of us just aren't that lucky. One such ladder for me was:

• Colson's How Now Shall We Live

• Willard's Divine Conspiracy

• Lewis' Mere Christianity

• Buechner's Telling the Truth

• Newbiggin's Gospel in a Pluralistic Society

• MacIntyre's After Virtue

While increasing levels of abstraction may be unhelpful, as our powers of reasoning and pattern recognition grow there is often a movement from familiar to unfamiliar, straightforward to what once might have been risky. No need to be fancy here — just let us know what took you where.

Or, if you are like me, books have been just as important for your emotional and aesthetic maturity. What fiction or poetry invigorated your moral imagination at just the right time? You grew up as you read and confronted various vices and virtues in a number of genres. For me Prince of Tides was invaluable. So was Brothers Karamazov. So was Lord of the Rings (which was required reading for a UNC course!). For many our students, Harry Potter was tremendously evocative and always comes to mind.

Given that we are interacting with hundreds of students who are in a crucial period of growth, what books were important in helping you grow up? Many of these probably weren't timeless, but they were helpful. A timeless and helpful book for me was Wolters' Creation Regained.

Or, maybe you are in a creative mood, and you would like to write a book recipe. Here would be one for getting over yourself that I really could have used my sophomore year of college:

• Book of Romans

• Keller's Counterfeit Gods

• Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos

• Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self

• Back 1/2 of Mere Christianity (on personality)

• Book of Proverbs

Feel free to send in your reflections to madison@ncstudycenter.org.

Happy reading this Christmas,

Madison

A brief liturgy for the end of a semester

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.” —Psalm 122:1 ESV

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep.

We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.

We have offended against your holy laws.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done;

and apart from your grace there is no health in us.

Spare all those who confess their faults. Restore all those who are penitent, according to your promises declared to all people in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may now live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of your holy Name.

Amen.

Grant to your faithful people, merciful Lord, pardon and peace; that we may be cleansed from all our sins, and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Note the emphases on things done and undone, as well as the promise in Christ Jesus of a quiet mind; so appropriate for any of us nearing any finish line.

•

Excerpted from The Book of Common Prayer, Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019