In the latest episode of Conversatio, Dr. Tom Varacalli sits down with Catholic apologist Trent Horn to discuss his book Why We’re Catholic. They explore the intersection of faith and politics, how Catholics can engage with secularism, and how to navigate tough conversations about the faith. This episode offers valuable insights for both new and lifelong Catholics on living out and sharing the Catholic faith in today’s world.
Alumni News
The Hero’s Quest: The Power of Story for Man as Homo Viator
In this sixth episode of Conversatio, Fr. Jonathan Torres, a 2013 graduate of the Abbey, explores the Hero’s Quest and the power of story for man as homo viator—the “man on a journey.” He shares insights with our honors college students on how the narrative of Christ, as depicted in the Bible, reveals the transformative power of story to shape human identity and purpose—and how we can understand our own lives as a story in the making.
What can I do with a Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education?
Belmont Abbey College’s Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education (MACLE) provides essential formation for professionals in Classical K-12 education: whether teachers, administrators, curriculum and resource creators, or homeschooling network leaders.
If your calling lies in classical education, this flexible, affordable online degree program with a 10-12 month completion date offers personal and professional development uniquely capable of transforming your vocation.
- As a classical K-12 teacher, you will develop the skills and understanding to inspire students with a shared love of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. By grounding yourself in a pedagogy specifically designed to engage students directly with the riches of the Great Books tradition, you will not only encourage active participation, critical and creative thinking, and thoughtful and genuine communication: you will change students’ lives.
- As a classical K-12 administrator, you will learn how best to support classroom instructors and their students, cultivating an authentic community oriented toward learning. Fruitful classroom seminars are only possible where a safe, ordered, and healthy community is free to grow and to engage with the Good, so classical education requires men and women like you who address the essential needs of an academic institution with wisdom and prudence.
- As a resource or curriculum creator, you will provide classical educators at all grade levels and across communities with renewed access to the timeless riches of the Western canon, facilitating profound encounters with the great conversation in which generations have engaged as they seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Curricular support extends this conversation and helps teachers to challenge their students, offer context, and explore further questions, scaffolding the skills by which students will discover ever more fully how to learn and engage.
- As a leader in a homeschool network, you will bring the depths of the Great Books tradition into the first of all schools, the home, by providing the tools and support that parents and fellow educators need to fulfill the mission they have so generously embraced. By taking such direct and active roles in their children’s schooling and their community as a whole, homeschooling educators model the joyful responsibility of lifelong learning in pursuit of wisdom, and offering leadership in such a community entails a profound contribution to the good of our society and culture.
Belmont Abbey designed its Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education in collaboration with the CiRCE Institute, ICLE, and the Veterum Sapientia Institute, all leaders in the classical education movement who are committed to forming men and women like you in the best that liberal arts tradition has to offer. In addition to exploring the Trivium and Quadrivium as foundations of classical education, the MACLE candidate gains critical pedagogical training while engaging questions of faith and reason, poetry and philosophy, civic understanding, and the human condition.
As an educator invested in the mission of classical education, you will have the opportunity to more deeply pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty while making the fruits of this journey available to your students and colleagues – ultimately inspiring them in their own journeys and nourishing the active community of seekers that lies at the heart of classical and liberal education.
If you are an educator seeking to grow personally and professionally, consider what an MA in Classical and Liberal Education could mean for your calling. Click here to explore the possibilities.
The Definition of Servant Leadership
“It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.” Usually we think of this as an unarguable dictum of the business world, stressing only the necessity of developing a professional network to advance in a chosen field. But Dr. Brad Frazier relays this to his Belmont Abbey College MBA students on their first day of Christian Ethics & Leadership for the Common Good, the message runs strikingly deeper, resonating with the kind of authentic, servant leadership that is more than a business strategy. It is a calling. It’s who you know.
In the words of Catherine Barber ‘15, Adult Degree Program alumna and pioneering graduate of the Abbey’s MBA, Belmont Abbey cultivates “a holistic approach toward corporate leadership. They focus on the fundamentals of what makes a great leader and the importance of their influence on a community or organization… While learning the ins and outs of business management can make you knowledgeable, the most significant impact is how you influence others with your knowledge. The most outstanding leaders can lead by the Golden Rule while valuing the feedback from those they lead. It’s about establishing trust and influence.”
An education in business goes beyond the knowledge you acquire through instruction and experience – though this is certainly important. It goes beyond the skills you learn and practice – including analysis, communication, creative problem-solving, and networking. And “who you know” is not simply about using influence to climb. Grounded in the Benedictine tradition of education, which orders the mind and the heart to the Good, Belmont Abbey’s MBA understands “who you know” as a call to true, faithful, and ethical leadership within a community. In fact, to servant leadership. The authentic leader builds trust and influence in service to something more – embracing not just “what” or “how” but also, and more meaningfully, “who” and “why.”
“This program,” Catherine states, “made me a better leader. Understanding the fundamentals of leadership with an enhanced ethical approach made me confident in understanding why servant-style leadership benefits the greater good and how Benedictine values reiterate the importance of understanding emotional intelligence. It made me realize how effective leadership is a two-way street built on communication and trust.” It depends on a recognition of personhood from both sides, a recognition that allows us to seek the Good with honesty, humility, and hope.
The Belmont Abbey MBA – while it certainly prepares students to excel professionally – embraces and cultivates leadership rooted in the personal, living dignity of communities. And for Catherine Barber, as a business professional, a wife and mother, and a member of a faith community, this holistic approach to corporate leadership created a meaningful synthesis between the demands of the business world and the essential, Benedictine values that embrace excellence and virtue in all things.
For Abbey MBA graduates like Catherine, and for all those they influence and encounter, these Benedictine hallmarks speak to the definition of servant leadership because they place community, stability, and stewardship at the heart of this calling. In keeping with love and hospitality, they seek to build up thriving communities where all are free to realize their authentic and God-given potential.
It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. Because the person before us and the community behind us give leadership its meaning and its purpose.
Consider what a Belmont Abbey MBA could mean for your future. Click here to learn more and embrace your calling today!
Faith-Fueled Journey: The Inspiring Story of MBA Alum Catherine Barber
In a sense, Catherine Rivera Barber began her Abbey journey long before she set foot on campus… because even before she’d ever heard of the Abbey, Catherine was learning what it meant to be a servant leader, a call that would find its catalyst years later in her formation as an MBA student at Belmont Abbey College.
The youngest of three, Catherine was born in New York but raised in North Carolina, where her parents moved the family while she was still very young. Both of her parents had come to New York from different parts of Latin America early in life, and having experienced the suffering and insecurity of a lack of parental influence themselves, they’d determined to raise their own children in loving security no matter the cost. Concerned with the condition of schools and neighborhoods in New York, then, Catherine’s father accepted a job in North Carolina and moved the family there. Soon after settling, however, he lost his job.
In the challenges and uncertainties that followed, Catherine grew up watching her parents continually give of themselves to nurture and support their children. And through this time of hardship and sacrifice, she saw them rediscover their faith.
As her mother began bringing the family to church each Sunday, Catherine became aware of another dimension of her parents’ love and care. Ever since, whenever she or one of her siblings struggle, they find steadfast support in their mother’s prayer, her affirming words, and scriptural encouragement. Her favorite Bible verse, Philippians 4:13, has even become a pillar of Catherine’s own spiritual life: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
So, years later, having graduated high school, earned two associate’s degrees, married, and had her first child, the Catherine who joined her husband on a whim in the Registrar’s Office of Belmont Abbey College was someone who brought with her the foundations of an education in true leadership – a foundation from which she could recognize what Belmont Abbey had to offer to her own vocational journey.
In two short years, Catherine had had her second child and completed her bachelor’s as a Business Management student in the Abbey’s Adult Degree Program, graduating in 2015. Completing her degree while shouldering the responsibilities of a young wife and mother – and increasingly mindful of all that she wanted to give and to teach her own children – Catherine was deeply grateful for the unwavering encouragement and the “life-changing” formation she received from her professors. “The adult degree program helped me and my husband balance the needs of work, school, and life,” she remembers, and at graduation they “walked the stage together.” So when Catherine discovered that Belmont Abbey now offered graduate degrees, she eagerly considered what an Abbey MBA could mean for her personal and professional growth.
Catherine was well aware that the businesswoman she hoped to become would stand as a contradiction to many popular conceptions of the industry, conceptions not without their basis in experience. While determined to apply herself, embrace challenges, and excel, she wanted these efforts to build something more meaningful – and more flourishing – than the culture of burnout and personal aggrandizement that loses the root of human good within the rush for success. Catherine considered her family and her vocation in all its complexity. She thought of her parents and of the kind of mother and woman she wanted to be. And she hoped that returning to the Abbey would not only equip her with the knowledge and resources she needed for professional success but also challenge and form her to exercise her capacity for true leadership, stewardship, and meaningful community.
The program did not disappoint. Having completed the one-year MBA in 2024, Catherine reflects that her Belmont Abbey studies cultivated “a holistic approach toward corporate leadership,” not only addressing the critical “ins and outs of business management” but also emphasizing the importance of true, servant leadership and cultivating the qualities that embrace its full and essential meaning, so richly infused with the Benedictine hallmarks.
Catherine completed her MBA while working full-time and continuing to embrace marriage and motherhood. Between the flexibility of online classes and the support of responsive, expert instructors, she found the Abbey’s MBA an ideal fit, in practice as well as formative vision.
“I had a fantastic experience with the faculty of Belmont Abbey College. They were always so encouraging and highly knowledgeable. Every course brought its challenges, which tested your understanding and made you dig a little deeper into every aspect of teaching. After every difficult assignment, I had an ‘AHA’ moment of reflection.” Building expertise in business communication, in data visualization, and in the technologies, theories, and culture that govern their effective practice, Catherine found in each class a new invitation to develop her skills and understanding in service to her calling as an ethical leader.
“Belmont Abbey’s MBA program was influential from the first semester,” Catherine said. Throughout her studies, but especially in her course on Christian Ethics and Effective Leadership for the Common Good, Catherine found new insights on her journey and its relation to different views of leadership, different Benedictine values, and the varied emphases of different cultures and communities. The need to understand, to listen with humility, and to make oneself present to others – uniting self-awareness and empathy with the capacity to recognize others’ strengths and weaknesses – all of this shed new light on Catherine’s deep desire to lead and to influence others for the good. “It gave me the confidence to speak to what I want out of my career,” she noted: not only the skills and knowledge but also the impact and the joy of meaningful community. “It (also) gave me… the ability to highlight my achievements,” she added, “At the start of the program, I was promoted to an Assistant Vice President position within one of the largest financial institutions in the US.”
Even during times of stress, when Catherine struggled to balance the demands of full-time graduate study with her family and career responsibilities, she drew strength from the faith her parents continued to inspire. At one point early in the spring semester, Catherine got sick and fell behind in her Corporate Governance for Law course. Uncertain whether she could recover her footing, she felt herself beginning to flounder. But when Dr. Ann Marie Hayes, who habitually sent Bible verses to the class as centering reminders, reached out with the familiar Philippians 4:13, Catherine heard her mother’s voice in her head and knew, truly, that she could do all things through Christ. “The power of prayer is very real,” Catherine maintains, as is the recognition of caring and inspired leadership. Men and women like her parents and her Abbey professors, who embrace servant leadership in the daily exercise of their vocations, have a profound and lasting impact in others’ lives. Catherine excelled in Dr. Hayes’ course and completed the Abbey’s MBA program in the joyful confidence that her own leadership journey would have the power to inspire and develop others, in turn, by the grace of God.
Today, as Assistant Vice President of the Charlotte Market in Global Financial Crimes – Special Investigations, Catherine has established a “mentorship opportunity within the company,” challenging herself to explore risk management and efficient data handling. She has now passed her CAMS (Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist) certification as well. With each new opportunity for growth, expertise, and credentials, Catherine recognizes a renewed call to apply her gifts, capacities, and knowledge in authentic servant leadership.
Belmont Abbey’s MBA “made me a better leader,” Catherine asserts. “Understanding the fundamentals of leadership with an enhanced ethical approach made me confident in why servant-style leadership benefits the greater good and how Benedictine values reiterate the importance of emotional intelligence. It made me realize how effective leadership is a two-way street built on communication and trust.”
Since graduation, Catherine has found her peers and supervisors placing more faith in her, more trust. She welcomes the networking opportunities and the challenge in complex cases, seeing in each new encounter the chance to have an impact. “Everything in my life ties together,” she says, and as it does, she recognizes the increasing desire to draw closer to God and to continue her spiritual journey. “Strong leaders are rooted in faith,” she states, bringing forth from this Benedictine stability the capacity to “wholeheartedly help others.” Now, looking to the future and eager to show her daughter and her sons that they, too, can do and be, she is “excited for the new journey.”
